Sam's video game collection essentials

Wario debuted as the villain of Super Mario Land 2. Then, he starred in his own game, “Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land”. And now Wario has shed the connection to Mario and Wario Land II stands alone as its own thing. Though it's slightly confusing when you consider the fact that this is actually the third Wario Land game. Virtual Boy Wario Land came between Super Mario Land 3 and this game. So is Virtual Boy Wario Land the "true" Wario Land 1 and Super Mario Land 3 is ultimately considered a Mario Land game, or is the series ignoring Virtual Boy Wario Land and considering some sort of side title? It's not clear. Anyway, this game released in 1998 as a very late original Game Boy title, and then it was given a color makeover a short time later. The color version is still compatible with the original Game Boy, so there’s not much reason to seek out the non-color version. This game initially feels a lot like the first Wario Land, as the moves are mostly the same. And it s...

What we have here is, basically, a port of the original Super Mario Bros. from 1985, along with its originally-Japan-exclusive sequel known in the west as Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels (which has to be unlocked and is not available to play right out of the box). And what’s cool is that this is not just a straight port to give players the ability to play it on the go, as a whole bunch of bonus features and modes were thrown in to make this a sweeter package.  The thing I have to mention first is the zoomed-in perspective. The Game Boy Color’s screen is, of course, quite small. When shrinking down a game meant for a larger display like a TV screen, sometimes this is a bit of an issue. Sometimes a developer has to decide whether they want to let the sprites be very small, or whether to “zoom in” so the sprites look roughly the same size as if you were playing on a TV, with the tradeoff that you can’t see as much of what’s going on. They opted for the latter in this case. It doesn’...

When Pokémon fever consumed the world in the late ‘90s, it wasn’t just the video games that every kid was obsessed with. Early on, one of the companies which developed the video games made official Pokémon trading cards. These cards hit store shelves in America just a few months after the video games did, and they promptly swarmed the land like a horde of locusts. Kids went crazy for Pokémon cards, especially the rare and sought-after holographic ones. It was such a huge phenomenon that some schools banned them. The vast majority of kids just wanted the cards because they looked cool. But if you actually look at a Pokémon card, you’ll see that it’s not just meant for decoration. Each card lists moves that Pokémon can use with various effects, as well as information such as hip points and weaknesses. Yes, these cards were part of a trading card game. This game was clearly inspired by Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game that had first released in 1993 to great popularity, setting t...

Time for a big one. Pokémon, as I’ve said before, lit the whole world on fire in the late ‘90s. There was all kinds of Pokémon media and merchandise to consume, but at the heart of it all were the original video games on the Game Boy: Red, Blue and Yellow (and Green if you lived in Japan). A true sequel to these games was obviously going to happen, and it was going to be very highly anticipated. And boy, Game Freak delivered everything any fan could have realistically expected and wanted at the time. I explained this in a previous post, but the core series of Pokémon is divided into “generations” to avoid confusion. It started (in the Western world) with the Red and Blue versions, which technically are different games but are nearly identical other than a certain few Pokémon being available to catch in one but not the other. Then there was the Yellow version which made some actual changes but was still mostly the same adventure with the same gameplay mechanics, fully compatible with th...

The stealth action game Metal Gear Solid on the PlayStation was a revolutionary title and one of the biggest games of its generation, in large part due to setting a new bar for storytelling in a video game. You can, of course, read my previous post all about it . You’d think by looking at the box that Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color is a scaled down port of that game, but it’s not. Instead, it’s entirely its own thing, a spinoff game which takes place in an alternate timeline after the original Metal Gear (before the series was Solid). And, actually, the game has its own title in Japan, where it was called “Metal Gear: Ghost Babel”. I’m not sure why they removed the distinguishing part of the name from the Western releases. I suppose they wanted people to associate it more closely with the PlayStation game that everybody loved. There were two previous Metal Gear games on 8-bit systems, and since the Game Boy Color is also 8-bit, you’d think the developers might want to more or l...

Any release of a brand new Zelda game is quite an event. So imagine how exciting it is for two to release at the same time!! These two games came out in 2001 and serve as brother-sister titles. Perhaps such an arrangement seemed attractive after the success of Pokémon and their tradition of releasing multiple versions of their games. But unlike Pokémon, these two Zelda games are completely distinct from each other. And what’s really cool is that they are meant to be linked together, either via passwords or with a link cable. The main idea is, once you complete one of the games, you use that data to start your playthrough of the other game. And this allows for new content (including a new final boss and ending) as well as changing up various events in the story. Beating Oracle of Season first will turn Oracle of Ages into a sequel, and the events of the previous game will be mentioned as having happened in the past. But the reverse is true if you beat Oracle of Ages first! It’s a neat t...

This is an updated, colorized port of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for the original Game Boy. For more on what this game is all about and why it’s great, please refer to my post about the original version . There’s not a whole lot to say about Link’s Awakening DX, really, because it’s pretty much the exact same game just with color added. Having color certainly is very cool! But there are generally no gameplay changes. Well…almost, but there are a few things! The biggest thing DX adds for sure is a brand new dungeon, called the Color Dungeon. As the name implies, this new dungeon takes advantage of the newfound color by having a series of color-based puzzles. Beating the dungeon gives you new outfits that increase Link’s offensive or defensive power. There’s also a more generous hint system, and there are some photos that can be printed with the Game Boy Printer accessory. Link’s Awakening was already one of the best Game Boy games, and DX is even better. There’s a 3D remake o...

Instead of giving Kirby another standard platformer on the Game Boy Color, Nintendo instead opted to do something technologically creative. Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble is unique on the system because it uses special motion capture technology built into the cartridge. Gameplay takes place from an overhead view, and Kirby rolls around curled up in a ball, with players physically tilting their Game Boy around to move him! It’s like one of those marble maze toys where you tilt the maze to move the marble around. You can even do a little more than simply roll him around, too, as a hard jerk will cause Kirby to jump. Gameplay is broken up in levels, as is standard. In each stage, you have a limited amount of time to reach the goal, and Kirby must navigate a series of obstacles and enemies. There are eight worlds of four levels each, much like the original Super Mario Bros, and each world features different environments and elements and ends in a boss fight. There are five featured minigames as wel...

Grandia on the PlayStation is one of my favorite RPGs all-time, as I explained in its own post . Game Arts saw fit to make a handheld spinoff RPG for fans of the original, releasing three years later. In this game, you play as a Japanese kid named Yuuhi, who gets whisked away with a couple of his friends to the world of Grandia. Naturally he wants to find his way home, and various characters from the original Grandia help him out on his quest. This game very much feels like something made specifically for fans of the original game. This is evident by the fact that you can recruit a large number of characters from that game, including many that were not among the playable characters at all. There’s sort of a “catch ‘em all” appeal here, as players are encouraged to try and find a way to get every possible party member to join. This isn’t too surprising since Pokémon games were all the rage at this time. Most of the music consists of remixed tunes from the original game’s soundtrack, and...

I previous covered Game & Watch Gallery 1 on the original Game Boy, which you can read about here . These games are basically the same concept. A bunch of Nintendo’s handheld LCD “Game & Watch” titles from the ‘80s have been reworked into these Game Boy compilation titles, plus there are “modernized” versions of some of the games available featuring Mario characters, new graphics, background music, and gameplay that’s a bit altered. They’re all high score-based games in which you can mess up three times before it’s game over (and sometimes technically more because sometimes a “miss” can get erased). And if you put up good enough scores, there are bonuses to unlock. And, actually, several games in 3 must be unlocked this way.  These games were a great fit for Game Boy, because they can easily be enjoyed in short spurts. To make it even better, you can even suspend your game midway through and shut the system off entirely to resume later! This is before “sleep mode” was a thi...

Game Boy first launched in 1989, and was a smashing success, dominating the handheld market for years. And it was rather remarkable that it did so despite not even being a piece of cutting-edge technology when it first launched, as there was another handheld console which boasted graphics and color and a backlit screen that hit the market the very same year. And as the years went by, Game Boy was even less impressive technologically and yet still remained number one in the handheld market all the way into the late ‘90s.  But at some point there would have to be a successor to the Game Boy featuring better technology. Sure, there were hardware revisions like the Game Boy Pocket which was smaller and used less batteries, but I’m talking a whole new Game Boy. And that wound up being today’s subject, the Game Boy Color, hitting store shelves in the fall of 1998. And it is perhaps a surprise that Game Boy Color doesn’t feel like a huge step up from the Game Boys that preceded it. The bi...