Sam's video game collection essentials

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...

Ocarina of Time had been one of Nintendo’s biggest smash hits of the previous generation, for the Nintendo 64. To read more about it, please see my blog post about it . When Ocarina first hit store shelves, Nintendo had plans for an alternate version of the game. It would have been released for an add-on system for the 64, but after many delays to said add-on, those plans had to be scrapped. They could have easily discarded the idea and moved on to other pursuits, but luckily they opted to bring it to life another way. This release, as the box advertises, is two games in one. There’s a port of the original Ocarina of Time here, with nothing but button colors tampered with. And then, there’s an all-new version: Master Quest. What is Master Quest? It’s mostly the same game, except the biggest part of the gameplay has been reimagined. In Master Quest, all of the game’s dungeons have been redesigned. They’re still the same locales as in the original game, with the same graphics, music and ...

By 2005, Nintendo had been in the business of 3D consoles for nearly a decade. It took this long for Fire Emblem to finally be seen in 3D. During the Nintendo 64 era, Intelligent Systems developed the fifth Fire Emblem game for the…aging Super Famicom (Super Nintendo), the last Nintendo-published game on that platform, and no Fire Emblem ever graced the Nintendo 64. The series had shifted to the 2D handheld Game Boy Advance for a few years before finally hitting the GameCube late in its lifespan.  Path of Radiance features a brand new continent, standing alone story-wise from the previous game. The continent of Tellius is home to Beorc (humans) and the Laguz (half-beast people who can temporarily transform into full-on beasts). You play as Ike, son of a warrior named Greil who leads a band of mercenaries to which Ike is a new recruit. The nearby nation of Daein is up to no good, and the game’s cast gets caught up in shenanigans after rescuing a woman who escaped from them. The stor...