Sam's video game collection essentials

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...

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...

“Mother” is the strange name of a JRPG franchise owned by Nintendo, which debuted with a Japan-only Famicom game that felt sort of like the very popular Dragon Quest series but in a more contemporary setting. The second “Mother” game would be cut from a similar cloth, released on the Super Famicom in 1994. That would be the first game in the series to be released in America, given the less-strange name “EarthBound” which is now the series’ official name outside of Japan. Mother 2 sold pretty well in Japan, and while it didn’t meet Nintendo’s sales expectations in America, it left a huge impression on many of those who got to play it, and it’s known for having a very dedicated and passionate fanbase. You can read more about EarthBound in a blog post I made about it a while back. Plans for Mother 3 were devised right around the time that Mother 2 first released. But the game did not have a smooth development cycle, and it took over a decade before Mother 3 as we know it saw the light of ...

One Metroid on the Game Boy Advance wasn’t enough! For the second go-around, Nintendo decided to give us a full-fledged remake of the very first Metroid. This made sense, as the original was one of those old-school games that can be tough to go back to years later after being greatly outclassed by its own sequels, feeling too frustrating and rough around the edges.  Zero Mission is not a game that you’d guess is a remake just from looking at it. The general map layout and enemies are roughly the same, but practically everything is reimagined here. New graphics and audio, new controls, an actual map, a bit of direction given to the player, and brand new additional content all round out this package. I can’t truly say that this renders the original obsolete, as the game is different enough that it’s kind of “its own thing.” But to the average gamer, there’s no doubt that Zero Mission will come off as a much more accessible, polished and enjoyable experience. You can even unlock and p...

Super Metroid in 1994 greatly raised the bar for the Metroid series and was released to critical acclaim. While it wasn’t one of Nintendo’s absolute top sellers on the SNES, its sales numbers were still more than respectable. So it is perhaps a surprise that Metroid as a series went dormant for quite a few years afterward. Not a single Metroid game was released on the Nintendo 64 or the Game Boy Color. But thankfully, Nintendo saw the error of their ways and revived the series once the Game Boy Advance hit the scene. Metroid Fusion plays a lot like Super Metroid, and is a direct sequel to that game. The story involves Samus being attacked on an expedition by small parasites called X. Her colleagues manage to rescue her and grant her a vaccine against the X. Parts of Samus’s power suit have to be removed and examined, which is a clever way to explain how she lost her powers in between games. But when trouble strikes at the space station, Samus has to go and investigate, finding that the...

Here we have the third Mario Kart game, and the first ever to be released on a handheld system. The first two Mario Karts are pretty different from each other, and Super Circuit combines elements from both of them to make an entry to the series that has always felt rather unique. It’s the only game in the series developed by their longtime partner Intelligent Systems. The Game Boy Advance hardware is much closer to that of the Super Nintendo than it is the Nintendo 64. And so, the track design much more resembles that of the original Mario Kart, as pretty much everything is flat. “Coins” make a return as well after being scrapped in the sequel, collectibles on the track that allow racers to move a bit faster. But the influence from Mario Kart 64 on this game is also very clear. The sprites are clearly based on those from that game rather than the original. The item system works like the one from 64, with the same item lineup minus a few. Races are still 3 laps as opposed to 5 like in t...