A buddy of mine gifted me a copy of this one a few months back. I knew I was getting my Analog Pocket at some point, and I saved it for the occasion. I completely ignored this Gameboy Advance launch game back in the day (I went with Circle of the Moon), so it was fitting that I broke in the Pocket with it. The Pocket is awesome by the way.

I always kind of assumed this was “just” Super Mario Bros. 2 which is why I never bought it or bothered to play it. Don’t get me wrong, I love SMB2, but at the time it didn’t seem like a good value proposition to me. It didn’t seem as exciting as SMB Deluxe a few years prior on Gameboy Color. That at least had a bunch of new features. I saw this as just the Allstars version on the go so I assumed it was a cash grab.

It turns out it’s actually really great, full of new features and with completely rebalanced difficulty. It's somehow both easier and more difficult at the same time where it hands lives and health out like candy but has way more enemies. There are loads of doodads to collect to keep even the most experienced SMB2 players on their toes. I was so into this that I found every single coin and secret Yoshi Egg possible. I’ll still go back to the NES version in the future for my SMB2 kicks, but this was a really nice surprise.

Added: Janurary 20, 2023

My Dial of Destiny excitement continues and led me to check out this mostly forgotten Wii and PS2 game. It sure is a Wii game, funneling you through a series of different game types and never really nailing one of them. I fully expected this game to be in line with something like Tomb Raider or Uncharted, but the opening hours were more like a beat ‘em up. After a few stages the game finally finds its footing as an adventure game with light puzzle solving and a de-emphasis on combat.

It’s too bad really, because I liked the adventure stuff and would have loved a whole game full of it. Hand-to-hand combat plays up Indy’s strengths as being a bit of an off the cuff style brawler where he makes the most of his environment by smashing foes into tables, beating them with chairs, glass bottles and using the whip to pull down rafters and bookcases. It’s almost cool stuff, but the motion control just isn’t there.

There’s a surprising amount of content on here like multiplayer modes using vehicles, and a separate co-op campaign with Indy and Henry Jones. There’s simply too much going on and is the classic “jack of all trades, master of none”. It’s super cheap and probably worth a look for Indy fans. Plus, it contains a port of The Fate of Atlantis on there as a bonus!

Added: Janurary 13, 2023

For whatever reason I can’t get anyone I know to play Splatoon. Obviously, it has its fans as it’s a huge property. I’d like to specifically talk to all of you who have ignored it for the last (almost) decade.

Did you love Mario Galaxy? Splatoon 3’s single player campaign is sorta kinda like Mario Galaxy 3. I’m willing to say that if this game was single player only and billed as some Mario off-shoot game it would have a Metacritic score in the high 90s. For as successful as this series has been, I think that critically it doesn’t get quite enough credit. Despite being an online focused game first and foremost, the creativity of the slightly tucked away single player mode is as good as the best games Nintendo has created. Saying it’s like Mario Galaxy 3 doesn’t mean it plays like a Mario game, but more so about how the game creates brilliant scenarios based around the unique weapons, move set and abilities. In that sense, it has the spirit of a Galaxy game.

Maybe you’re a little older and you’re turned off by the weird squid kids and squid divas and all that stuff. I get it. If you can get by that stuff, there’s a heck of a game waiting for you to discover.

Added: Janurary 13, 2023

The arrival of the Dial of Destiny trailer put me in the mood for adventures with Indiana Jones. I started rewatching the movies and I decided to play this old SNES title that combines the first three films into one game.

I’ve attempted to play this one over the years but always get frustrated on the second stage which involves Indy running away from the massive boulder. There’s almost zero room for error and the boulder takes up a huge portion of the screen. If you’re not looking screen right the entire time, you’re toast.

Thankfully I somehow passed it on my first try. I was hot off watching Temple of Doom, so maybe I had the spirit of Indy running through me. If you’ve played any of the Super Star Wars games for the SNES, you know what to expect here. It’s so close to those that you could almost consider this the fourth game in the series. These games are almost incredible and nail the big picture stuff like visuals and audio. It’s the seemingly little (but most important) things, like poor hit detection, confusing level layouts and unbalanced difficulty that keep them from being genuinely great. Worth checking out for Indy fans though!

Added: December 23, 2022

You might know Crazy Castle as the game so bad that it caused the Angry Video Game Nerd to become frustrated enough that he and Bugs fought to the death and ended up in Hell together. Or maybe you know it as the series that starred characters like Bugs, Mickey Mouse, Garfield, Woody Woodpecker and even Peter Venkman (I’m serious). I remember it as that weird maze game with lots of doors. I liked it enough back then.

Fast forward to today. It’s fine. It’s an inoffensive maze game that is secretly a stealth game where you’re spending your time sneaking by and tricking the likes of Sylvester, Wile E. Coyote and Daffy Duck. For a NES game there’s a lot here, with 60 stages and some bonus ones too. It generously hands out simple 4 character passwords after each stage which is great for quick sessions.

I can’t really recommend it today, but if you have fond memories playing it as a kid, you’d probably get a kick out of revisiting it.

Added: December 23, 2022

The NES version of Taito’s classic light gun game is about as basic as you can get. I found it in a bargain bin so I figured I’d give it a shot. While not a particularly good version of the game, I found myself enjoying what was there regardless. I guess there’s just something about juggling the basics of conserving ammo and not hitting hostages that appeals to me even at its most primitive form.

I’ve been wanting to try out more Zapper games and I was hoping this one would scratch the itch. It’s nearly unplayable with the Zapper. You may as well just shoot blindfolded, and you’ll get the same result. This game is way too twitchy compared to Zapper games with a more deliberate pace like Hogan’s Alley or Duck Hunt. It’s impossible to keep up and it sure is noisy squeezing that springy trigger over and over. You also need to have a NES controller in your free hand because you have to press the B button and the trigger to fire off a bomb. It’s asking a lot.

Using the standard pad and setting the cursor speed to its slowest setting makes it playable. For the 12 minutes the game lasts, it’s kind of fun.

Added: December 2, 2022

Upon completing Xardion I couldn’t help but take note that celebrated anime studio, Gainax, was credited. I did a quick Google search and found that there was a brief period where Gainax dabbled in video game development while finding their footing as a company. They did work on this, Alisia Dragoon, and Princess Maker. Neat!

Apparently, this game had a decent push when it launched in Japan but failed to connect with players. Over here in the States, it was the kind of game you’d rent from Blockbuster if nothing else good was available. That’s my memory of it, having only played it briefly back then & not being impressed. I thought it stunk.

I’m still not impressed, but there’s almost a great game in here. It’s an action game with various giant mechs you can switch out whenever, an experience system, and some light backtracking which was kind of unique at the time. If an idea like this was applied to something that was as polished as say Cybernator, that would have really been something. As it stands, Xardion is a middling experience that thankfully doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Added: November 24, 2022

I have somehow never played a Tomb Raider game before. I wanted to play the original game, but my Playstation is currently buried, so I bought Anniversary for the Wii (a whole $5!) since I have that hooked up.

Initially I was really into this. I enjoy Uncharted and Prince of Persia and this feels right in line with those. I’m conflicted on the platforming. It’s nice to play something that isn’t basically one button like Uncharted. In Uncharted it feels like you have skill, but the game is doing it for you. The platforming in Tomb Raider has some room for improvisation, and it doesn’t spell the path out as clearly as Uncharted. At the same time, I felt frustrated by frequent deaths and sitting through lots of load screens to get back into action. It made me realize how intuitive the time rewind in Prince of Persia really was for its time. I think if this one was a little shorter, I’d have been more into it, but it turned into a slog for the final few hours.

I did come to appreciate Lara Croft and the franchise in general. Lara deserves to be the icon she is. I probably won’t play more of these. I don’t know. Maybe?

Added: November 17, 2022

Resident Evil 4 is my favorite Resident Evil game. I love the balance between the amped up action and the scares. I even love the inventory puzzle game. I love that I can suplex zombies.

After playing Village, well, the fourth one is still my favorite, but this is up there. Despite being a sequel to the previous first-person Resident Evil, this one feels more like a spiritual successor to the fourth game. It’s heavier on the action, still has scares, and it even has the inventory puzzle game. No suplexes though. It does have a giant 9-foot-tall vampire lady, however. She, along with her daughters, chase you all over the place for the opening hours of the game.

There was a moment where it looked like this game was going to open up and allow me to venture off in the direction of my choosing. This felt exciting and I wasn’t expecting an open world-ish Resident Evil game. Unfortunately, I was wrong, and the game stuck me right back onto “the path”. Maybe the 9th game will bring something like that to the table. This was a great ride regardless. Also, incredible bosses!

Added: November 12, 2022

I really wanted to get this game way back when it came out. Nearly 30 years later I have finally been able to give it a shot thanks to the Cowabunga Collection. I’m glad I waited 30 years, because if I played this as a kid, I probably would have snapped my Gameboy in half.

This is a mostly fun Metroid style action game where Mikey sets out to rescue his brothers. Once saved, each bro has their own unique action. Mikey (who floats) and Don (who climbs walls) are the most useful, while Leo and Raph basically act like Samus’ bombs and morph ball. They all share a health bar and their attacks are virtually the same.

It is the bosses that made me want to scream. They’re brutally hard and extremely cheap. If not for save states, I probably would have given up. Especially the ending boss rush before Shredder. My god. By the time I made it to Shredder I was completely defeated and relied on the rewind button a lot. I usually try not to use new features like these, but it would have been a matter of never playing again and I just wanted to see it through. With some balance tweaks, this would have been awesome.

Added: October 6, 2022

This was a game I never even heard of until a few years ago when a bunch of us rented out a few hours of game time at the legendary Todd Tuckey’s TNT Amusements (if you grew up in the Philly area in the 90s, you know). There it was, a sit-down super scaler style “racing” game with a steering wheel, but also with two guns mounted to the dashboard. It’s an amazing co-op game, with one player both driving and shooting, and player two being a dedicated gunner. You can even get real crazy and cram three bodies into this thing and each person has their own task. We played through the whole thing, and I never saw it again.

That was until the other night when Barcade Philly had one. Of course, I ran right over to it and convinced my nephew to hop in. It was new to him, and it only took him a few moments to realize how awesome this game is. It has such a great presentation that is full of personality. The portraits of the main characters constantly reacting to the action in the rear-view mirror is like having two Doom guy heads at once. We kept piling in the tokens until we saw it through. I’d say it probably cost us close to 10 dollars total. Not bad.

If you’ve never played this before, well you have a new goal in life. Find it and play it!

Added: September 29, 2022

I saw this one at Dave and Busters and since it’s this strange spin off to a game that becomes more niche with each passing year, I felt the need to try it. As I played it, I felt the need to complete it. It’s essentially a giant Wii light gun game, but the gimmick is that you’re supposed to be standing in an actual elevator. You step up to a platform and the bottom of it rattles and shakes and does a decent enough job emulating the feeling of traveling down an actual elevator. Sure, you don’t quite “feel” it in your stomach like you do a real elevator, but it’s a neat little trick.

I tried to get my daughter to join in, but she opted out. So, it was me versus the robots for however long it took to get through this thing. Maybe close to 20 minutes? I just kept swiping that card until I eventually prevailed. It didn’t feel overly difficult or cheap with only a handful of moments feeling impossible. I think with a second player those moments would have been perfectly do-able.

If you ever find yourself in a ticket redemption hell arcade, it’s a fun way to spend some time while your young one's waste all their money on the Big Bass Jackpot wheel.

Added: September 19, 2022

The most notable thing I can say about this game is that a year ago I scored a copy of it off Facebook Marketplace for $5, and it was located in my town. Apparently, it’s worth close to $100 now. Nice.

I finally decided to play it, and despite the fact there are two full games on here I managed to play through the two of them in about 40 minutes total. Gunblade, and its semi-sequel L.A. Machineguns, are both Sega arcade shooters from the 90s so they’re both brief but fun experiences. Neither of them does anything particularly unique, but if you have a soft spot for Sega Model 2 and 3 arcade games, you’d probably dig this pairing. I personally love playing light gun style games on the Wii, one of the genres that had lots of variety on the system but were essentially all ignored because well… they were light gun games on the Wii. Outside of House of the Dead no one seemed to care back then? Oh well, their loss.

Having never played either of these I found myself enjoying Gunblade much more. It seems fairer, has two (short) campaigns and what I really liked was the score attack mode that opens branching pathways depending on how you perform. That mode is completely missing from L.A. Machineguns (at least I couldn't find it). Worth playing for a night of fun cheese-ball thrills with bad voice acting and unintentionally hilarious moments, but not worth today’s asking price.

Added: September 8, 2022

I played the original SNES version of Pocky and Rocky briefly at a friend's house back when it was released. My only memory of it is that we had fun and it was a blast on 2 player mode.

Reshrined is the latest entry in the series, and it’s built to look just like you remember the original, but it looks really, really nice now. I was hoping to share this one with another player but the 2-player mode has to be unlocked by completing the game on single player. Imagine if a new Contra game came out and co-op was locked. It would be blasphemous. And this is a brutally tough game too, so it’s not even like someone can just waltz in and unlock the 2-player option. I hate to ding games on things they don’t have, but a strafe/lock button also would have made a world of a difference for this one. It’s kind of frustrating trying to line up your character and hoping they’ll turn properly to hit your target.

Once I completed the game and co-op was unlocked, I had little desire to play much more of it. At that point my skill level and knowledge of the game would outweigh whoever I brought in as 2P and it just wouldn’t have been much fun. Missed opportunity, but a decent throwback game regardless.

Added: August 30, 2022

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The small and talented team behind this one obviously love 

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and who can blame them? Aside from Super Metroid, it’s likely the greatest game of its type. Symphony is 25 years old now and games still want to look, sound and play like it. Symphony of the Night isn’t just a classic, it’s a masterpiece.

Deedlit wants to be Symphony, right down to its almost mirror image run cycle using classic anime character Deedlit as a stand-in for Alucard. Aside from adopting Ikaruga’s polarity swapping mechanic, Deedlit doesn’t bring anything new to the table. And really, not even that’s new, but using it in another game type at least brings a certain novelty with it.

Deedlit is exactly the kind of game you think it is, no more or no less. Depending on where you stand this is either a good thing or a bad thing. I think it’s just a “fine” thing. It’s a can-be-missed game, but not a 

terrible way to lose 4 hours. The short run time means most players will probably get through to the end, but almost no one will remember it a day later.

Added: August 24, 2022

I played through Mother 3 on a DS Lite with both my daughters at each side. Not the most comfortable way to play this one. I wish I never sold my GBA Player. Anyway, the day after we completed the game I took my twin daughters out for their birthday dinner. They turned 12. The game came up in conversation while we were eating. They asked me what I thought about it and I said “I thought it was sad.” That's when my daughter said she felt herself getting upset during the final battle (in particular when Lucas started to cry) but that she kept it together because she didn’t want to cry. Next thing you know we look at my other daughter who is now in tears with a chicken burrito in her hand saying how horrible she felt for the twin brothers. She laughed at herself and we laughed too, but we were all on the same page on how it made us feel.

This one grew on me. There were times when playing it when I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Like Earthbound Beginnings, I’m not sure I’d have finished it if it wasn’t for the girls asking me to keep pressing on. I’m glad they did, because as the days went on after finishing the game I kept thinking about it. I pretty much can’t hear the Tazmily theme without getting a little worked up. I’m not sure if it’s because the story of twins hits a little close to home or I’m getting sappier with age, but regardless I’m happy we were able to experience this classic. 

Added: August 9, 2022

My kids have known I was kind of a weeb earlier in my life, and will occasionally bust on me for it. When I first fired up 13 Sentinels they made fun of me and it. I was asked why I was playing this boring anime game, along with questions like “Why are they naked?” (that has an actual answer in-game) and “Why are that girl’s boobs so big?” I told them I heard it was good. I also let them know big boobs is a Vanillaware tradition. An answer that led to further questions.

I’d usually play on weekend mornings when I’d have an hour to myself, but wouldn’t you know it a few characters deep into the story and my one daughter took a liking to it. I went from solo sessions to only being allowed to 

advance the story when she was around. I’d do battles to get strong when she wasn’t around.

My family happened to be around during a scene where one of the characters talked at length about the fictional food “hemborger”. For whatever reason this got my wife’s attention and the next thing you know she found a recipe for it and we’re eating hemborger for real for dinner. Like what did this game do to us? Anyway, I loved it and got a Platinum trophy.

Added: July 6, 2022

The day before Shredder’s Revenge hit I asked my daughters how excited they were to play it on a scale from 1 - 10. They both shrugged, one said 4 and the other said 7. We have been watching the original cartoon and they’ve become fans of the show and characters, so I thought they’d have a little more excitement. I told them I’m at a 10 and that we were all going to play the following night. They nodded.

The next night we gathered around the Switch, pulled my wife into it as our Player 4, and started our quest to save New York. I think they mostly were willing to do this thing for my sake because they knew I was pumped. It wasn’t long before everyone was super into it and the screaming and shouting began. Later when my wife said she was getting tired, I was surprised that the girls wanted to keep moving forward. They were hooked.

Heading into the next night, it was now the girls that were pumped to play and finish the game. We all had a blast and I was thankful to have a new (and awesome) TMNT game that I was able to share with the family. I wonder if this is the kind of game they’ll go back to time after time like many of us have with games like Turtles in Time? 

Added: July 1, 2022

A good friend of mine had this one when we were growing up. I found it strange (scary even), and while I played the heck out of it back then I was too young to parse that this was really a horror game parody and not supposed to be scary at all.

Monster Party plays around with both pop culture horror and gaming tropes filtered through a Japanese lens for an American audience. It begins as a happy-go-lucky Super Mario style game but almost immediately the happy-faced blocks melt into skulls and the water turns to blood. Lost on the American audience at the time are all of the yokai references like the human faced dogs, but there’s nods to Alien, Friday the 13th, and other Hollywood classics as well.

The end of the game reveals that the hero saved a Princess, just like in Super Mario! However the Princess melts into a grotesque zombie which then melts the skin off the hero. I remember being horrified by that, but looking at it now it’s more in line with the sense of humor of a Sam Raimi horror flick. Fun to revisit this one.

Added: June 27, 2022

My new favorite stage in this game is one of the stages I disliked the most as a kid (platforming stages aside). That would be the helicopter stage. The entire stage takes place on a small screen inside the 

helicopter where thug after thug come piling out of the cockpit. Aside from the tight quarters, the real hazard is the broken helicopter door that randomly flies open sucking out anyone standing by it.

The stakes are high as you balance your positioning near the door. The risk is you too can fly out if an enemy gets the upper hand, but the reward is great if you manage to toss them out. Finally, they send out Abobo who can throw you right out the door, but with careful play you can do the same to him. He can be dispatched with a single hit if you’re good enough (a flying knee will do the trick).

I still think that the NES version of Double Dragon II is the best Double Dragon game ever made and the best brawler of its kind on the NES. Sometimes I think it must be nostalgia talking, but then I’ll revisit it and it will reaffirm my feelings.

Added: June 24, 2022

I would have completely bailed on this game if it wasn’t for my daughter who oddly took a liking to it. She happened to be there when I decided to check it out when it dropped on NES Online. I liked what I played but she was the one that insisted we play more. This is a grueling difficult game. It’s “NES Hard” and to help get through it I used lots of Save States and consulted a FAQ often.

But as much as I struggled, she loved watching it. She didn’t mind when I’d grind for EXP for what seemed like hours. She liked the simple story, the cute graphics, and the general weirdness of it. As we fought the final boss she told me she felt nervous for me. She felt nervous over a black screen, some text, a simple graphic and flashing lights. It’s as rudimentary as it gets, yet she was completely sucked in. I thought it was awesome too.

It’s nice to see something as seemingly basic as this can still work its magic on a new generation. She’s since moved onto Earthbound for the SNES, slowly making progress all by herself. (And since this writing she’s wrapped up Earthbound and we’ve moved onto Mother 3 together.)

Added: June 2, 2022

My favorite Kirby game is Kirby’s Dream Course and the most traditional Kirby I have any sort of connection with is the original Game Boy game. Kirby isn’t really my thing, but it is my daughter’s thing. Naturally she bought Forgotten Land and tore through the main story in a weekend.

I thought it looked like a fun game so I picked away at it over the last few weeks. My daughter likes being my co-pilot with this game since she enjoys being the one that can share all of the tips and secrets with me. Sure she’d shout out things before I’d even begin to look for them but that’s fine. She was having her moment of being the Game Master.

Back on her file, she became a little frustrated trying to find all the Waddle Dees, but I lit a fire under her when I slowly surpassed her collection of them and earned myself little trophies of Kirby and his pal for the game’s village. So she hunkered down and got the rest of them the next day because there was no way she wasn’t having those trophies. Now she’s secretly in a race to get to 100% first. 

(Which she won since writing this)

Added: May 27, 2022

I had never even heard of this one until the other night. The nice thing about having an arcade cab loaded with ROMs means there is always something new to discover. Though in my case I get overwhelmed and default to Ghouls ‘N Ghosts or Street Fighter II and call it a night.

I played Edward Randy based on its weird name and what I found was an amazing, 20 minute long Indiana Jones inspired roller coaster ride of an action game. Think of the wild set pieces from an Uncharted game, only being pulled off with technology from 1990. Edward leaps across boats, whip swings from truck to truck, chases a train, and whips a mechanical monster in the face while riding a bi-plane across the ocean. It’s relentless, action packed, and humorous. It’s probably the most cinematic style game to have existed at that point in time not counting the Laser Disc games of the previous decade. I wish I could have seen this as a kid, because I’d have been completely floored.

Added: May 18, 2022

The general rule of thumb is that if you put down a game for a few months (especially an RPG) you’re  probably just never going to finishing the game. If you go back to it, you’ll likely start from scratch. NES Remix is the rare game I was able to hop right back into 9 years removed and finish it off.

I’m a huge fan of NES Remix 2 and played the heck out of that at release. The first NES Remix is 

essentially the same thing, but what kind of kills it is the game selection. Sure it has challenges from Super Mario Bros., and Zelda, but most of the time you’re playing tons of NES Golf, Pinball, Tennis, Urban Champion and heaven forbid Clu Clu Land. Chopping these classics up into bite sized chunks with clearly 

defined goals helps make them a bit more palatable to today’s tastes but at the end of the day it’s still too much Clu Clu Land than one needs to experience.

As you can tell, I’m not big on Clu Clu Land. I’d rather play Urban Champion. Anyway, I’d be up for a SNES Remix. I’d even take a Gameboy Remix.

Added: May 9, 2022

This is the first time I played through Zelda since I created the guide for it so I was a little rusty. When I was playing this game again I was laying in a hospital bed for a few days (I’m fine). My wife asked if she could bring anything and I asked her to snatch the Zelda Game & Watch that I use as a clock (imagine that) at my work space. It was the perfect game to play as I’m familiar with it enough to where I can just plow through it. Most importantly it’s a game that brings comfort to me. That iconic title screen alone where it just boots right into that logo, with the waterfall and the music will never not bring me joy. Can you imagine turning on a new game today and it just goes right into the title screen?

These new Game & Watches are really nice. Zelda packs a lot more game than the Super Mario Bros. one does, but I love the limited approach to these handhelds. You can buy a portable with a zillion games installed on it for 30 bucks, but there’s something nice about just focusing on a few games and giving them the attention they deserve.

Added: May 2, 2022

This universally acknowledged all-time great is remembered for lots of things, but I don’t hear much talk about the way it turned secrets into an objective. Mario games always had cool hidden secrets like warp zones, extra lives and bonus rooms, but none of them really baked the secrets into the game as a trackable thing. Mario World changes this. Afterall, the cover of the game even challenges the player to find all 96 exits. 

Previous Mario games were all about how many stages you could skip, whereas this game is more so about how many you can actually find. Having a battery backup flipped the script on what the expectation of a Mario game was to be, and it’s all the better for it. Curious players are  rewarded with secret paths and even more stages to complete. Finding it all is more difficult than anything in any prior Mario game, and if you manage to complete the bonus stages you’re treated to a… Halloween themed dinosaur island complete with a fall setting, pumpkins, and Koopas in Mario costumes. Kind of a weird reward, but who doesn’t love Halloween?

Added: April 4, 2022

My parents bought me Mega Man X for my 11th birthday. If you didn’t live it, you probably heard the stories of going to Toys R Us, picking up the slip to bring to the blah, blah, blah. That was this. As a NES Mega Man fan, I felt like Mega Man was growing up with me while flipping through the manual in the car ride home.

Keiji Inafune, creator of Zero and character artist on many Mega Man games, was a guest at MAGFest 2016. I took my same copy with me to the show for him to sign. I almost missed my chance, with MAGFest staff ushering my nephew and I away, but Inafune was cool enough to sign our stuff anyway.

For my 40th birthday I decided to take this same copy out again and give it a full play through. Of course I loved it. Aside from it just being a classic, this particular game now carries its own little history for me personally, and I’ll always treasure it for that.

Added: March 30, 2022

I could talk about the music and audio from this game at length, but what stood out this time was the story. Our schlock film loving hero, who I can’t help but think is a parody of Marty McFly, just wants to escape the simulation he’s been thrown into. Like Marty, the story isn’t so much about him as it is everything around him. Other real humans in the simulation actually like being there, and while not completely reluctant to go home, would have been just fine staying there for eternity in their own self-absorbed worlds. 

I also love the dog companion more so now, probably because the first time I played this I never had a dog of my own. I appreciate the lack of melodrama, the not-so-serious tone, and fun dialogue. I really wish this game worked out, because I’d love to have seen what would have come next. Too bad that it will be stuck as a SNES exclusive for the rest of eternity. 

Added: March 24, 2022

Turtles in Time is the rare case where I like it more than the Arcade original. The hits feel better, the sound is superior, and it has been balanced enough to where one could actually get good at it.

I played through this with my daughter. She’s a year older than I was when this was new. I’m not so sure she loved it like I was loving it, but I enjoyed her perspective. We’ve been watching the cartoon together, so she liked seeing all the characters from the show. She said April looked better than she did in the TV show. When the game had some slowdown and sprite flicker she thought it was a feature. I told her sometimes old games would just slow down. She loved the “Hulk-Loki slams” the Turtles can do to bad guys. She asked if Bebop & Rocksteady were really in the past or if that was past versions of themselves. I told her I really never considered that, but I assume Shredder put them there. When the game ended after 27 minutes (according to our in-game clock) she said “Wait, it’s over? That’s it?”

Yup, that’s it, and it’s just about perfect.

Added: Feb 1, 2022

This was a horrible game. I hated it. Playstation had amazing boundary pushing RPG after RPG, and “us” N64 owners were stuck with Quest. After my weekend rental I decided to never play it again. Until a few weeks ago when I had a strange urge to revisit it. 

To eBay!

It still isn’t good, but I like Quest now. It had the unfair task of being held to a standard that it could never hoped to have achieved, nor did it even want to. It didn’t want to be a Final Fantasy VII killer. What it really wanted to be was a nice little homage to the RPGs of the past, having striking similarities to the original Dragon Quest. Take a NES RPG and put it in 3D and you’ll end up with something sort of like Quest. It’s obvious this team ran out of time as it lacks polish, has loads of empty rooms, and forgets entire plot points, but its heart was in the right place.

Added: Jan. 26, 2022

There’s a scene at the start of Ocarina of Time where Link is leaving behind the village he grew up in search of something greater. His childhood friend wishes him goodbye and good luck. There is no music. Just the sounds of the environment, and a moody atmosphere to accompany it. When I get to this part I generally sit on the dialogue and just soak it in a little longer. 

I love it.

Later in the game you wrap back around to this same spot and you notice just how small this little room is. As adult Link they pull the camera back just enough to make old environments feel smaller, but it can really be felt here. Link has grown, both physically and mentally. Zelda games excel at making you feel moments like this. As if you yourself really grew too. This is a timeless classic as far as I’m concerned, and it was a pleasure to revisit.

Added: Jan. 26, 2022