Sam's video game collection essentials

  Our next system is one you’ve more than likely heard of if you’re above a certain age, even if you’re not a gamer. It’s Nintendo’s wildly successful portable gaming device, Game Boy. The Game Boy launched in 1989. It was not the first portable handheld game system to use interchangeable cartridges, as such a thing had been created a whole decade prior, the Microvision by Milton Bradley. But prior to Game Boy, no such system had ever achieved any real widespread popularity.  The funny thing about the Game Boy is that it wasn’t really cutting-edge technology even for the time. The Game Boy screen was in monochrome, and had no backlight, meaning the player needed an outside light source to see the screen. In the very same year, the Atari Lynx would be released, and it boasted both color AND a backlight, which are undeniably nice things to have. But the Game Boy absolutely trounced the Lynx and all other competition. Why? The answer was Nintendo ingeniously finding the right bal...

Here is a game that is on this list not so much for the game itself, but for the meme it inspired. Zero Wing got a European release in English, but…whoever was responsible for translating the introductory cutscene did a lousy job, and I guess there were no native English speakers working on the process, because the game shipped with lousy, incorrect English dialogue. A decade later, the internet started to poke fun at it, and it became everyone’s favorite running joke. The most popular line from the intro was “All your base are belong to us”. I myself caught “all your base” fever and found the lousy English to be absolutely hilarious. I even bought a shirt with the iconic line on it, which I still have to this day. As for the game itself, it’s a shoot ‘em up, so there’s basically no dialogue in the game aside from that one introduction. That’s a shame! Zero Wing isn’t the best or most unique shoot ‘em up in the world, but it’s pretty decent. It has a tractor beam mechanic where you can...

The original ToeJam & Earl was a very unique game. For this sequel, though, they decided to do something entirely different rather than build on the foundation of the first game. ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron is a 2D platformer, which as you probably realize by now was a very common thing back then. Thankfully, though, this is far from just being a cookie-cutter, run-of-the-mill platformer, so it’s not as though all the creative juices were drained. After reassembling their ship at the end of the first game, ToeJam and Earl travel back to their home planet of Funkotron. But when they arrive, they discover something most unfortunate; a whole mess of earthlings stowed away on their ship and are now running rampant! They must be stopped! And so, the objective of this game is to scour every level for earthlings until you have captured every single one, and then you can throw them onto a rocket headed to Earth and proceed to the next level to find more. How does one capture ea...

Here’s a very unusual game from early in the Sega Genesis lifespan that wound up with a strong following. You play as the two characters named in the game’s title, ToeJam (the red one) and Earl (the one with shades). They’re aliens who were cruising around space for the fun of it. ToeJam is the pilot, but Earl wanted to try his hand at flying the ship on a whim during this little trip. Well…it didn’t go too well. They crash landed on the strange foreign planet Earth and their ship shattered into a bunch of pieces! Never let Earl drive. The object of the game is to explore Earth and gather all the pieces of the ship. I guess this alien ship comes apart like LEGOs or something, maybe it’s built to separate so it can still function when reassembled! This game takes place from a top-down perspective, with the player(s) free to move ToeJam and/or Earl in all four directions. As you start the game, you seem to be on an island in the middle of a vast body of water, and there’s an…elevator nea...

There’s some deja vu going on here. We’ve got yet another 2D platformer, and yet another Konami game.  This one, as you can see, is based on the popular cartoon from the early ‘90s, Tiny Toon Adventures. This show from Warner Bros. was a successor of sorts to the iconic Looney Tunes, and it featured a series of young characters in school to become the next generation of Looney Tunes. It was a very good show, though I was too young to watch it when it first aired. By the time I was old enough, I was aware of it but didn’t get to see it very often, so it was one of those things I thought was cool but never really got to indulge in. But you don’t even need to know or like the cartoon to enjoy this great game. There’s not a ton I have to say about it, as it doesn’t really reinvent the wheel when it comes to 2D platforming. But it does feature large, well-designed levels that sometimes give the player multiple ways to go, perhaps learning from Sonic. I never knew about this game as a ki...

This is Konami’s sequel to Rocket Knight Adventures, a game I discussed not long ago. I don’t have a ton to say about it, but because the basic concept is the same, a 2D platformer where you have a jetpack ability that can send you rocketing forward. That’s not to say Sparkster is just a rehash of the original though. The mechanics of the jetpack boost were changed this time. It charges up automatically, and has two levels of charge as well. The game has a “true” ending that dedicated fans can go for, which involves playing on hard mode and collecting all the various hidden swords throughout the game.  I don’t have much history with Sparkster on the Genesis, but the one time I played through it I had lots of fun. It’s my favorite game featuring the possum, unless I change my mind upon replaying them. Konami wanted to make Sparkster their mascot to rival Nintendo’s Mario or Sega’s Sonic, but for some reason he never caught on nearly enough for that. I’m not sure why, since his games...

Back in the heyday of arcades, a genre that rose to prominence was the “beat ‘em up”. These games typically are fairly simple. They’re games where your character can move in four directions and can attack, jump and pick up stuff to use as weapons or to heal. Usually there will be a few enemies at a time that the player(s) have to deal with, and very difficult bosses at the end of the stage that are sure to eat your quarters. Beat ‘em ups are not one of my favorite genres, partially because it’s very easy for them to feel stale and repetitive unless the developer is really good at spicing up the experience with each stage. Streets of Rage 2 is somewhat unusual in that it was designed for home consoles first, and not arcades. Most of the time games came out on arcades first, and then an adaptation would be made for consoles, which often involved making compromises with graphics, sound and content since consoles usually weren’t as powerful as cutting-edge arcade technology. Streets of Rag...