Sam's video game collection essentials

  As of right now, Adventures of Lolo currently holds the record for the longest time I’ve owned a game before beating it. It was one of the early NES games I acquired circa 2004 thanks to mom  yard sale shopping, and I only just beat it last year. That’s roughly 18 years!! That record will almost certainly fall at some point, but Lolo has it for now. Another fun fact is that the box, manual and cartridge you see in the photo are all authentic but were all acquired separately! Adventures of Lolo is what you’d call an “action puzzle game”, where you do control a character freely moving around the screen, but the game is not primarily about testing your reflexes and beating up bad guys. Instead, the idea here is that the game presents you a logic puzzle that you need to use your brain to figure out, and defeating enemies and using proper timing is only an occasional complementary element for a specific solution. In Lolo, puzzles often involve setting up obstacles so enemies can’...

  The background of this game and its series is amusing. Basically, in the ‘80s, a company called Escape was tasked by Sega to make an arcade game called “Wonder Boy”. A strange byproduct of this was that Escape held the rights to the game, but Sega owned the rights to the brand and characters. Another company, prominent developer Hudson Soft, acquired the rights from Escape to publish Wonder Boy on the NES, but they had to change the characters and music in order to not violate the copyright from Sega. This new version would be called “Adventure Island”. So who would they replace Wonder Boy (the character) with? Well, Hudson had an employee involved with public relations that had achieved minor celebrity status through stuff like hosting tournaments and a TV show where he talked about Hudson Soft’s games, so the company decided to make a cartoonish version of HIM as the main character! For the American release his name was changed to “Master Higgins” since Japanese names don’t rol...

  !!! LONG POST INCOMING !!! The most historically significant game console of all time, the one most iconic in the category of “old school gaming”. In this post I’m gonna touch on the history of the NES, why it matters, my own experience with it and what it’s like to play it today. There is so much that can be said about it that some sections are gonna have to be abridged. In the early ‘80s, home consoles weren’t really a thing in Japan yet like they were in the United States. Some Japanese companies had enjoyed success making arcade games, so naturally some of them, like Nintendo, saw a huge opportunity in making a console that would let people take the arcade games home. Nintendo soon devised the “Famicom” (short for “Family Computer,” Japanese people are sometimes fond of using English words in their titles) which they released in 1983 launching with three games from their arcade repertoire. Nintendo was smart because they sought a balance between making a console that was cutt...

  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...

Another Starpath game gifted to me by  Keith Messier . Dragonstomper is a rather obscure yet highly significant game, because it may have been the first RPG ever released for consoles! (Its actual release date is not known precisely) Many old RPGs are not much fun to go back to at all in modern times, so you’d expect this one to feel borderline unplayable today. But surprisingly, that’s not the case! Sure, it’s never going to sniff any “favorite RPG” list of mine, but playing this game for the first time as an adult in the 2010s, I found myself getting invested and having a good time. Unlike most RPGs, there’s not really any story to speak of here other than “big dragon bad, hero must kill dragon.” Starting a new game, you’re thrown right into the action. The game takes place in three phases. In the first, you’re basically going around fighting enemies in turn-based battles and checking out points of interest on the map looking for ways to increase your stats, earn money and find i...