Sam's video game collection essentials

I’ve talked a bit about Ms. Pac-Man before when I covered the Atari 2600 port. It’s one of the absolute top most successful and most iconic arcade games ever. I think I’m going to wait to talk fully about the original arcade version until I get to a more 1-to-1 arcade version, and today I’m mostly going to focus on this particular version of the game and how it stands out. This is actually what you could call a remake of a port. Tengen made an NES version of Ms. Pac-Man in 1990, which they also made for the Sega Genesis a year later, and then this SNES version for some reason didn’t come out for another five years, late in the SNES’s lifetime. It’s basically the same content as those previous versions, only with enhanced graphics and sound, taking advantage of the SNES hardware. What’s unusual about the Tengen version of Ms. Pac-Man is that they didn’t directly port the assets from the original game, rather, they had to build it from the ground up, which is why it looks a little differ...

Mortal Kombat continues, and does another good job making a sequel that stands out. Mortal Kombat 1 took place on Earth, Mortal Kombat II took place in the dangerous realm of Outworld, and Mortal Kombat 3 sees Shao Kahn and his minions from Outworld invading Earth. And while it’s also on Earth, the stages in 3 are generally more urban and with less of an Asian style. The cast of characters is also mixed up once again with several newcomers unlike anybody from the previous games, such as the cyborg ninjas Sektor and Cyrax. Mortal Kombat 3 introduces a couple new major gameplay additions. The first is a “Run” button to help make gameplay. The second is “dial-a-combos”. If you’re next to your opponent and hit them, you can press additional buttons for more hits and more damage. And the sequence of buttons to press depends on which character you’re playing as, so you have to memorize the combo sequences for each individual character, for better or worse.  The violence in this game is a...

Remember how I said Nintendo didn’t want a violent game like Mortal Kombat on their system, so they tried to have the best of both worlds by having a SNES version of Mortal Kombat 1 that removed the blood and toned down the violence? Yeah, well, after the Sega Genesis version won handily on the sales charts, Nintendo promptly changed their tune. The SNES version of Mortal Kombat II has all the violence of the arcade original intact. I guess money makes a big difference. Anyways, Mortal Kombat II is a clear example of a typical improved video game sequel. The game doesn’t introduce any radical new gameplay ideas, and the plain basics are roughly the same as the original game. But II is pretty much better in every way, having more content, and polishing what was already there in the original. Just about the only way I could see someone preferring the first game would be if said person really loved playing as one of the two characters that got removed from the roster, but I think most wou...

I already talked about Mortal Kombat for the Sega Genesis, so please refer back to that post for more info on the game and the controversy behind it. Mortal Kombat was one of the most violent video games in an era where graphic violence in games wasn’t a norm yet, which freaked people out. At first, when it came to controversy over violent video games, Nintendo first thought it best to side with concerned parents, pledging not to let blood and gore on their games in order to appear more principled, and so that consumers wouldn’t have to worry about it. Now, Mortal Kombat was a super popular game and Nintendo would have been silly not to want it made for their console. So Nintendo tried to have it both ways and make the SNES version very censored. All the blood from the arcade version is gone in this release. Instead, when characters take certain hits, you’ll see sweat fly from their face. There are still finishing moves for the end of the fight when it’s time to kill the opponent, and...

Here is another game here purely for nostalgia. MLBPA was THE baseball video game I grew up with. Originally my cousins Kevin and Peter had it and I would play it at their house, but then it wound up in my possession. I don’t remember if they just gave it to me, or if I traded them something for it, or what. All I know is that the copy in the photo is the one from our childhood all those years back. MLBPA Baseball is named as such because it got the license from the players union to use all their real names, but they did not get the license from MLB to use actual team names and logos, so the teams are named by what city they play in and merely have color schemes like the real teams do, with no logos. So it’s the opposite of Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, which had all the real teams and logos but no actual player names except Griffey.  This is certainly an adequate baseball game, but nothing really special at all, definitely inferior to the aforementioned Ken Griff...

This is the sequel to Battle Clash, a game I talked about a while back . Like Battle Clash, this game requires the Super Scope peripheral, so it’s basically a light gun game. And it’s one of the best games of its kind out there. This is an example of what a video game sequel should be. It takes a game in Battle Clash that was already good, and improves and adds to everything to make a game that’s clearly better. Metal Combat just has that extra layer of polish that pushes a game from good to great. The graphics are better, there’s more content, more modes, more variety in gameplay, and this time the game has a battery backup to store saved games for record-keeping. Like Battle Clash, the gameplay of Metal Combat consists of a series of what are basically boss battles against a series of giant robots. Gameplay in light gun games tends to be fairly simplistic and amounts to “see things, shoot things”, but Metal Combat is a little deeper than that. There is enough variety in your abilitie...

This is a rather peculiar game. After the several Mega Man games I covered this past week were released, Capcom made the next mainline Mega Man game for the next generation of consoles, complete with updated (but still 2D) graphics. You’d figure that the Blue Bomber would be leaving behind the previous generation by then, as almost literally every other franchise was. Instead, Capcom decided to make this game for those who had not yet upgraded to the latest hardware. It’s technically a spinoff game, but basically plays like another full-fledged entry in the main series. And it also uses the graphics from the aforementioned next-generation Mega Man game that had already come out, and recreates them stunningly well on the old hardware. The game never released outside Japan, as support for old consoles back then typically died off much quicker in other countries, and almost literally nothing was released for SNES outside Japan by 1998. (There was a port on a future Game Boy system that sa...