While I wouldn’t call myself a Pokémon fanatic, I do really enjoy the games because they are so well made, and because I love level-grinders. Pokémon Pearl (and its companion, Diamond) is considered by many as one of the best games in the series, and people still love to play it now.
Compared to previous generations, Pokémon Pearl has lots of new features, and compared to later generations: the series hasn’t yet started to collapse under its own weight.
The 2009 hand-held follow-up to the classic PS2 game Dragon Quest VIII is another fine level-grinder, with cheerful, colourful graphics and mesmerising gameplay.
Continue reading Dragon Quest IX, Nintendo DSThe Ren & Stimpy Show: Veediots! is a somewhat disappointing 1993 platform game developed by Gray Matter and published on the SNES by T*HQ.
Continue reading The Ren & Stimpy Show: Veediots!, Super Nintendo
The Nintendo Entertainment System version of David Crane‘s Ghostbusters is known for being a bit of a mess, compared to all the other versions.
It was initially released in Japan in 1986 and later in North America in 1988. Why the two year delay? Probably something to do with the fact that the game is terrible…
Mario Kart 64 is the successor to the brilliant Super Mario Kart on the SNES and the second game in the famous Mario Kart series. It was first published by Nintendo for the N64 console in 1996.
Released into arcades by Nintendo in 1983, Mario Bros. is a one or two-player platform game featuring Mario and Luigi as the main characters. Incidentally, this was the first time Luigi ever appeared in a video game.
Mario Bros. was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi – two of the lead creators of Donkey Kong, of which this game is a follow-up.
Nintendo‘s 1982 arcade game, Popeye, was somewhat ahead of its time, and also in some respects as archaic to play as a Game & Watch.
It was ahead of its time in the way that it used a relatively high screen resolution (512×448), which results in quite detailed, high res sprites that are unusual for the time.
Unfortunately the same can’t be said of the background graphics, which look like something designed on an Atari 2600… In fact: Popeye is a weird mix of graphical resolutions, but this weirdness doesn’t affect the gameplay at all.
First in the classic Harvest Moon series, this cute Super Nintendo ‘farming simulator’ was developed by Amccus and published by Pack-In-Video in Japan, Natsume in North America, and Nintendo in Europe.
It wasn’t the first farming simulator ever to come out (that might be SimFarm by Maxis (1993), although there may be earlier examples), but it was certainly one of the first to really popularise the genre.
Pokémon Ruby Version – released the same time as Pokémon Sapphire Version – was developed by Game Freak and published by Nintendo in 2002 in Japan and 2003 everywhere else. It is known as a ‘third generation’ Pokémon game.
This 1991 release from Codemasters is the first game in the award-winning Micro Machines video game series and – boy – does it kick-start the series in style!
In fact: it established the staples that make the series so good, like the themed tracks, and the ‘race-to-the-edge-of-the-screen’ style racing.
