We’re getting to that point where most of the games I have yet to cover fall somewhere on my “Top Favorites” list. I haven’t talked about most of them since I fear I won’t be able to do them justice. But since I can’t put them off forever, have one of my faves.

See, of all the traditional platforming Mario games (aka, not Kart/RPG/etc.) … this has always been my favorite:

Maybe it’s the solid gameplay. Or the catchy music. Or the quirky design. Or all of the above. All I know is that sometimes, when I have 20 or 30 minutes to kill and nothing else to do, I can pull out SMB3 and play through the first world for the millionth time and enjoy every freaking second of it.

Come on, guys. You KNOW this music makes you happy.

There were a ton of secrets in this game– getting “behind” the trees and bushes for one, or those warp whistles that would take you to far off levels. I knew and played around with all the secrets, but one day I sat down, determined to play through the whole thing from start to finish without the whistle.

…I got to about halfway through world seven and couldn’t get any farther. Curse you freaking pipe maze!

Still, seven of eight isn’t bad, and eight is pretty near impossible anyway from what I’ve played by using the whistles, so it’s not like I ever would’ve beaten it anyway.

Man. Thinking about that Pipe World still makes me shudder a bit.

Really, though, have you ever just sat down and thought about the Mushroom Kingdom? It’s filled with flying turtles, pipes with plants that shoot fire at you, airships, raccoon suits that make you fly, and shoes that you can bounce around in.

…

I want to live there.

I hope it’s the SMB 3 version.

P.S. – WHO REMEMBERS THE MCDONALDS HAPPY MEAL TOYS??

Because I seriously had all of them. The Goomba didn’t work very well, though.

Remember back in the day when the original Pokémon was the biggest deal in the world? You know what the first non-Game-Boy Pokémon game was? That’s right. Pokémon Freaking Snap.

Everybody was stoked over this game. I mean really, this was a huge deal for us oldschool Poké-freaks who lived in a bizarre world filled with rumors of Mew being under the truck by the S.S. Anne or the Celadon Dept. store thirsty girl giving you a “Pikablu” if you gave her enough drinks. Pokémon Snap was a dream fulfilled. Finally we got to see Pokémon in those glorious, blocky, N64 polygons.

The premise of the game is pretty simple: Go around and take pictures of Pokémon. You get points based on the pictures you take. Then you can sort the pictures into albums and stuff. I know it sounds like some sort of Flash or Facebook game gone wrong or something, but somehow the game managed to be fiendishly addicting.

Also, hitting Mew in the head with an apple over and over again in the last level was hilarious. Especially because it would go “Me-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-eew” as you did so.

…actually, though, there is one reason in particular why this is today’s Classic Video Game Monday. That reason is the Poké Flute song that can be heard here from about 0:16 to 0:31:

I have hummed and whistled this tune all the freaking time ever since this game came out eleven years ago.

Now that’s staying power.

*whistles it again*

Lode Runner is one of those games that should probably be more well known than it is. Not to say the game isn’t already pretty well-known, but, you know, in my opinion there should be a chicken in every pot and a Lode Runner in every household.

This oldschool favorite (I played it on the Commodore 64) worked as follows: You, as an adventurous young stick figure, climb up ladders and monkey-bar your way across polls to collect little cubes on the ground, while trying to avoid a bunch of other stick figures who for some reason are out to get you. Also, I guess they’re robots are something.

Fortunately for you, you have a shovel, and you can dig holes into the ground behind you, which your enemies will fall into. This is relatively humane when you do it from higher platforms, but if you do it while on ground level they’ll wind up buried alive.

…fortunately for them, they respawn. Hmm. I suddenly wonder about the ethics of killing someone in a world where you respawn a minute later. There should be a video game philosophy class somewhere.

Also, this song is now stuck in your head.

Anyways, this whole deceptively simple premise is the fuel behind a remarkably addictive puzzle game with probably about a hundred levels, plus a level editor, which was a pretty radical idea at the time. I remember my dad loved this game and got really far. To level 64 or something, which was unheard of for Baby Pike, who plinked around at level nine.

This game spawned a sequel that I also played, called Lode Runner’s Rescue, which had exactly one thing in common with the original game and that one thing was the name “Lode Runner” in the title. Still, for having nothing whatsoever to do with the original, that game was also pretty dang fun. Too bad I can’t find anything about it on Google, so you’ll just have to trust me on this.

Lode Runner is still around– I’ve seen clones of it in the Ubuntu repositories and remakes pop up on various platforms every so often. (Heehee, platforms. I see what I did there.)

But the best praise for it? Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov called it his favorite puzzle game. You can’t get much more legit than that.

One of Nintendo’s Really Good Decisions was the decision to launch the Super Smash Brothers franchise.

A fighter that doesn’t take itself seriously… pretty much at all, while still providing silly amounts of replay value and being a game that pretty much anyone can pick up and play. Yes, folks, this is a win.

I think what initially won me over was the hammer. See, I grew up playing the original Donkey Kong. The original Donkey Kong includes a hammer, which kills everything, as it plays this little ditty. I had aaaaaaaalmost forgotten about this hammer, and it itself had aaaaaaaalmost faded into obscurity, when Super Smash Bros. came out. And they had a hammer. I sort of died little bit from the sheer levels of Awesome and Win.

You know what other item was great?

The freakin’ BASEBALL BAT.

Because if you time it juuust right, it’s a one-hit KO. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing that sparkle on your bat as time seems to slow down riiiight before it happens…

…

And that noise. CRACK.

It’s the most satisfying noise in the world.

I can’t find any good vids on YouTube but YOU KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT.

So, anyway. Pikachu was my favorite character, because come on, it’s freaking Pikachu. We all know what happens when Pikachu gets serious:

I got pretty good with him. I mean, I was never one of those super-die-hard SSB players, but I could hold my own. One time for a school project I went to some other student’s house and we played SSB for a little while. The other kids (well, we were college age, but you know) tried to talk me into playing and at first I refused, cause it had been a while and I was rusty, but finally I relented and grabbed a controller and bust out Pikachu. I won. It was glorious.

Actual photo of Pike playing Smash Bros. Note the goggles.

Ahh, good times.

Really though, classic game right here. I never really got into the successors, though that’s mostly due to lack of time more than anything. (Oh, and not owning a Wii kind of complicates things.) But yeah. One of the better things Nintendo has ever done? Undoubtedly.

I know what you’re thinking. “Mickey Mouse? Really, Pike? Really?”

Yes, really. This is Capcom platforming at its best. Basically they took a Mega Man game and replaced Mega Man with Mickey Mouse. It sounds lame, but the awesome gameplay is still there, regardless of whether your character is a robot or a rodent.

You play as the Mouse himself as you travel through various worlds to find and rescue Pluto. Yes, your ubiquitous Fire World and Ice World are here, but there’s also a climbing-mountain world and a magical forest world that I found to be unique and memorable. That magical forest world had great music, too:

True to form with Capcom, you get to don a variety of outfits that change your fighting style… in this case, you can have a Wizard suit, a Firefighter suit, or a Climbing outfit. Of these three, the climbing outfit is the most gimmicky, but the other two are great (albeit fairly similar to each other). You can change the outfits whenever you want, including mid-fight… it’s kind of like Fisher-Price’s My First Mega Man.

Combine this with solid controls, hidden item shops where you can buy upgrades, and giant rolling tomatoes, and you’ve got a winner, Disney license or not.

So yeah. At first glance you might think this game has “Generic kiddie platformer” written all over it but really, it’s solid and comes with some great things that make it unique. When Nintendo Power released its first list of “100 Greatest Nintendo Games” back in 1998 or whenever that was, this game was on the list. You know, alongside stuff like Chrono Trigger, Link to the Past, and Super Mario 64. Just sayin’.

P.S. yes, I have this game on Game Boy Advance. The final boss is hard.

In this game, you play a guy with a helicopter jetpack, some dynamite, and laser vision.

Sounds awesome, no?

Yeah. It was.

This game gives you dozens of levels, which throw more and more obstacles in your way as you go on. Obstacles include: walls, which must be destroyed with your limited supply of dynamite, the lava-coated version of the same walls (which kill you), Evil Light Bulbs which turn off if you go the wrong way, reducing your visibility to zero, and a variety of animals like spiders, bats, moths, and snakes, all of which will also kill you if you don’t laser-vision them. (This game single-handedly justifies my irrational fear of moths, by the way.)

Then at the end of each level a guy tallies up your remaining time and dynamite and gives you points based on what you have left. At this point you’d be sent to the next level. As you progressed through the levels, the game would start sending more obstacles and various alternate paths at you, making what started as a simple game rather difficult after all.

One of my favorite parts of the game is the sound. There’s no music for this game, but between the copter-pack and the bombs there are a variety of fun sound effects which I will still launch into imitating without warning.

Choka-choka-choka…
chick… POOM
choka-choka-choka
choka-choka-choka
peeeew
tcccchhhhhheeeeewwwwwwww
POOM POOM POOM POOM POOM

Seriously that’s the first level. Check it out:

See, you can’t deny my sound effects aren’t accurate. You can’t deny it. You should hear me IRL.

Now, when I think of this game, I invariably think of my mom. See, I come from a big gaming family. I was playing online games back before most people had a computer– we’d play them over the modem. Anyways, it was mostly my dad and uncle who would do the gaming every Sunday, but I guess one day my mom wanted something to prove so she sat down and memorized basically this whole entire game, twisty pathways and all. She owned everyone at this game. Nobody could beat her. It was ridiculous.

I can’t remember how far I got personally. Maybe level 12 or so. (This game got difficult.)

Regardless, this game was a blast. It was such a simple concept: fly around, shoot stuff, and blow things up, but they managed to add some sort of level of strategy to it and enough levels that would get juuuust harder enough to keep you playing for a really long time.

Oh Commodore 64, you rock.

Once upon a time Japan had a quirky but addictive little puzzle game named Panel de Pon. Nintendo took it, rebranded it so it was about Yoshi and pals, and released it as Tetris Attack, and life was suddenly a lot more awesome.

Tetris Attack operates on the simple idea of lining up similarly colored blocks either vertically or horizontally to make them disappear. Three in a row works, but you can do four or five for extra points. This sounds simple enough, and even a tad underwhelming, but where things really start to get exciting is with the chain reactions you can cause to build combos and score obscene amounts of points, and completely screw over your opponent if you’re playing multiplayer. Like such:

This simple little idea was stupidly addictive and the number of hours I spent playing this game is probably close to the hundreds. In fact, I even owned a Game Boy version of this game– not nearly as good, but you know, puzzle games are ultimately meant for long road trips, and this game was no exception.

The cute characters were a bonus and the catchy music was an even bigger one. All you need to do is hear all of Blargg’s Theme to become a believer in this case. I actually wrote lyrics to this song when I was 14 or 15 years old, because I am a dork. No, you don’t get to see them. Also, the credits theme is possibly the most relaxing thing you will ever hear in an SNES game.

Nintendo later replaced Yoshi with Pikachu and re-released this game for Nintendo 64 as Pokemon Puzzle League– the name change, perhaps, was because they realized that this game had absolutely nothing to do with the original Tetris. (And, you know, to get people to buy it, because this was at the height of the Pokemon Craze.) I prefer the Yoshi version, myself, although Pokemon Puzzle League did include a pretty ingenious “3D mode” where you spun your puzzle around a cylinder.

Anyways, regardless of how you play the core game, you should. I’d do pretty much anything to have this game on my cell phone. Seriously, Nintendo. Tetris Attack. Cell phone. Kay?

See, I’m not kidding about the credits theme. Don’t listen to this if you don’t want to fall into a blissful sleep. Just a warning.

The SNES was great for racing games. You had Super Mario Kart, F-Zero, the Top Gear games, and this quirky, super-polygon-filled title called Stunt Race FX.

All the cars in this game have eyeballs. So it’s kind of like The Brave Little Toaster or something. Which, by the way, is a movie that I hold solely responsible for how absolutely terrible I felt when my first car fell by the wayside and had to be towed away. Rest in pieces, dear 1990 Chrysler LeBaron!

(The guy in the TV cracks me up though.)

Now Stunt Race FX is one of those games that never got as much attention as it probably deserved. Sure, it didn’t do anything particularly groundbreaking, but when it retread old ground, it did so very solidly. The controls were tight and the tracks were fun. And the 3D was a big deal back then. I mean, I could be wrong, but I remember just this game and Starfox as being the only games of this kind on SNES.

The music was pretty good too. I found a Stunt Race FX remix on OCRemix this one time and I was like “OH EM GEE” because I had almost forgotten about this game. It sort of made my day.

You gotta admit, this 3D is pretty good for being on a freaking SNES.

Anyways, the point is that Stunt Race FX is a pretty unknown game, and that’s really too bad. Sure, it’s not gonna be on any “SNES Top Ten” lists anytime soon, but that’s more of a side effect of the SNES being the best gaming platform EVER than anything else.

And c’mon. Cars with eyeballs. Never gets old. (Just ask Pixar!)

In a bit of a twist today I am going to tell you about a game that scared me half to death when I was a kid, and still scares me today:

This is Jumpman for the Commdore 64 (and Atari, I believe). It looks innocuous enough, doesn’t it? You get to take control of a blocky pixel guy who gets to jump around and collect diamonds.

Then you start to play the game and there are bullets. Just, randomly. Bullets. Heat-seeking bullets. That will make 90 degree turns if they get near you so they can destroy you. They make gun noises. That noise will strike fear into your heart.

Scary thing #2 about this game: When you die, the game makes this TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE NOISE. It sounds like somebody doing very evil things to a synthesizer while you watch your lifeless ragdoll body plummet to the ground, bouncing helplessly off of every obstacle in the way. The guy in the video I posted dies a couple of times if you really want to see and hear it. (You don’t.) It’s horrific. NO PIXELS SHOULD HAVE TO GO THROUGH THAT.

Did I mention it was stupidly easy to die in this game? One misstep and you’re toast.

Scary thing #3 about this game: When you ran out of lives the game would start flashing red, (cue seizures here), as this fanfare played. Except it was like a reverse fanfare because most fanfares sound like they’re leading up to something good. This fanfare sounded incredibly foreboding, as though it was leading up to something impossibly terrible. And all this while the screen is flashing red. I can’t express to you how terrifying this was to me as a three year old kid. (I tried to find a video of this on YouTube but sadly I had no luck.)

Now let me tell you about one of the earliest nightmares I can remember having. I must have been about three or four years old, and in my dream my dad and my uncle were playing Jumpman (cause they used to do that when I was a kid), and somehow I just knew that if they got a Game Over the world was going to explode. I tried to warn them, but they wouldn’t listen to me. They got a Game Over, that terrible fanfare and the flashing screen came up, and the world exploded. Then I woke up.

AND YOU WONDER WHY I AM SCARED OF THIS GAME.

As for the game itself– I guess it was amusing enough if you could get past the whole thing about being maddeningly scary. The premise was pretty silly… apparently the Jumpman is actually an alien or space ranger who saved the planet or something? I don’t know, that’s what I worked out from watching my uncle beat the game (I figured he must have been some sort of god among men for actually playing through the whole thing), but then again, this is Commodore 64 we’re talking about here.

All I know is that no scarier game has ever been made. Eat your heart out, Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

At least the cover is hilarious.

'Well on MY planet, 80s fashions are still cool.' *whips out Walkman*

This was an NES game that involved a little light gun that you could actually shoot at the screen. I played this game a lot. I seem to recall being pretty good at it, too, for being six years old or however old I was.

Of course, I only remember one detail about it:

…and I’m sure I’m not alone here.

I can still hear the laugh. Can’t you…?