Sam's video game collection essentials

  After two Donkey Kong games, Nintendo’s next big arcade game was Mario Bros., not to be confused with the more-famous “Super Mario. Bros” which came later. So, naturally, there was a Game & Watch called Mario Bros. The curious thing here, though, is that this Mario Bros. has basically nothing to do at all with Mario Bros. the arcade game. The Donkey Kong Game & Watch was a distinct thing from the original arcade game, but it certainly resembled it and was a different take on the concept. But this Mario Bros. feels like they invented something random that involved two characters and decided to just slap the “Mario Bros.” name on it for marketing purposes. Now, is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, as this game is pretty fun. Mario and Luigi work in a bottle factory. Mario takes an empty box out and puts it on a conveyor belt, where it goes through the machine which adds bottles to it, and Luigi waits on the other side needing to pick up the box and put it on the next conve...

  Donkey Kong was Nintendo’s first big hit in arcades (more on that another time), so it’s not surprising that they made a Donkey Kong Game & Watch. Of course, there was no way they were going to come anywhere close to actually replicating the experience of playing the arcade game on an LCD screen. So rather than try to recreate the game exactly and fall well short, this is more of a reimagining of it that is more tailored to a quality Game & Watch experience, which was smart on Nintendo’s part. The level shown here is similar in concept to the first level of Donkey Kong, but is obviously not a copy of it, and in fact your objective is a little bit different. In this one, your goal is to dodge the barrels while ascending up to use a lever to raise a crane that has a dangling hook, then you have to time your jump to grab onto the hook (instead of falling on your face) and pull out one of the things supporting the beam that Donkey Kong stands on. Once you pull out all four, D...

  Behold, the first of very many Nintendo products in this series. Nintendo’s first successful foray into the video game world were these little standalone portable games in a series called “Game & Watch” which ran from 1980 until 1991. The action takes place on an LCD screen. I’m not familiar with how specifically exactly it works, but basically, all possible animations for the characters and objects in the game are engraved into the screen, and they “light up” in deep black when the actual game is going on to display the action. The word “Watch” refers to the fact that the unit can display the current time and have an alarm set. Game & Watch was a success for Nintendo and the series sold millions of units. However, being a ‘90s kid, I don’t remember ever hearing about or seeing these things at all. What I DO remember were many LCD handheld games by a company called Tiger, which were never really all that good but any kid my age remotely interested in games probably tinker...