I just stumbled upon Gamespot's feature called the Greatest Games of All Time and it got me wondering what games I think should be on that list.:

• Sonic the Hedgehog 2
• Mortal Kombat II
• Super Mario Bros. 3
• Bubble Bobble
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Kirby's Adventure
• Super Mario World
• Yoshi's Island: Super Mario World 2
• Mega Man 2
• Star Fox 64
  

I'm up to 100 posts on the forums! Not much else to really write about, but I haven't done a journal entry for a while. I've been playing Kirby & The Amazing Mirror. Good game, but not as good as Kirby's Adventure on the NES or the GBA remake Nightmare in Dreamland. I've also been playing Yoshi Touch & Go trying to get the high scores in each game mode but it isn't all that easy. Oh well. That's it. Till next time.

I submitted my first game review today for Mortal Kombat: Tournament Edition on the GBA. It was a lot of fun to write but it took me a while. I'll do more as soon as I can. People should Trust my reviews :D

The original Nintendo Entertainment System was the first video game console I owned. My parents bought it for me for my 5th birthday and from then on I was hooked. It came with the 3-in-1 cart of Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and World Class Track Meet, complete with the Zapper gun and Power Pad. I always found it peculiar that Nintendo chose to redesign the gun from gray to bright orange because people thought it resembled an actual weapon. I don't know that I ever beat Super Mario Bros., but I had hours of fun trying. (Sadly not as much fun playing the new GBA version, even though they're the exact same game.) And when I played Duck Hunt, I always cheated by standing right up next to the big screen TV in my living room. When my cousins came in from Israel for visits they'd always ask if they could "shoot the ducks." Good memories.

When the new top-loading version of the NES came out, my original still functioned perfectly and I, unfortunately, saw no reason to buy the new edition. I've since searched all over for the top-loading one and bought it online.

My favorite two games for the NES by far were Bubble Bobble and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Zelda II introduced me to the franchise (I only recenlty played the original Legend of Zelda) and, even though a lot of people consider it to be the black sheep of the Zelda family, I thought the gameplay and music were great for an 8-bit machine. Bubble Bobble always evokes strong memories of my little brother and I playing for hours to collect the passwords for all the 100+ stages and then finally getting to the big end boss. You'd have to beat him by popping what Jeremy and I called "fart bubbles" so that a bolt of lightning would shoot out and catch the big green goblin-looking-thing as he was boucing around the screen. We had it down to a science.

Anticipation was also addicting to me for some reason. I still play it now, too. It was the first "board game" to come out on a home system, and all you had to do was watch the game connect dots and then guess the picture.

My other favorite games for the NES include (in no particular order):

Mega Man 2 - my intro to the Blue Bomber, and much better than his new incarnations
Double Dragon II: The Revenge - awesome brawler, and hopefully will show up again on the GBA??
Super C - first and only Contra game that I played all the way through
Pinball - addicting game with an odd Mario and Princess cameo
Kirby's Adventure - still a classic, and a great GBA port
Blaster Master - impossible to beat but still fun to try
Mickey Mousecapade - not really sure why I loved this one so much
Rainbow Islands - confused the hell out me why a sequel to Bubble Bobble could be so different and so fun
Castlevania II: Simon's Quest - scared the hell out of me with the eerie music
Dr. Mario - for me, more fun than Tetris
Marble Madness - also hard, but should be remade into another great puzzle game
Super Mario Bros. 3 - when I rented it and played through, Blockbuster only had the Japanese version so I didn't know what was going on and it was still a blast

Looking back on the NES, I think it's unfortunate that so many of the games are unplayable by today's standards and kids that play video games today have no idea where their games come from. It's also sad that the nostalgia for a lot of the NES games is probably better than the actual experience, as evidenced by my short attention span when going back to replay them now.

All in all, the NES was a great system. It established Nintendo as the gaming giant it is today, and introduced my entire generation to the magic of video games.

I've decided I want to post or write reviews/comments for the video game consoles themselves. I assume Gamespot doesn't have space to post those things like they do for individual games, and it's more for my own reminiscing anyway. Just thought it might be fun. First up will be the NES, and I'm gonna try doing them in the order I bought the systems.

This is apparently how I study for my midterm tomorrow.

So I joined a few Unions. I really like the whole concept. I wanna start a Mortal Kombat union but I don't know anyone that would want to. I think I appreciate that game more than most people. Oh well.

I've been so disappointed with the Nintendo DS lineup so far. I just bought Yoshi Touch & Go and Retro Atari Classics hoping they'd give me a better reason for picking up my DS besides playing my GBA games with better resolution. All of the games out for the DS so far have been games that I can pick up and play for a few hours, beat, and then only rarely pick up and play again. Sure, innovation is great, but the replay value has just been awful.

Take Wario Ware Touched. I loved the original GBA version mostly because of its unlockable Dr. Mario update. Sure, the game itself was fun, but once you've played through and beaten the micro games, it doesn't have the same addicting gameplay anymore. The same is true for the DS version. It was fun while it lasted, but with no good unlockables to keep me coming back, I can't bring myself to play the game more.

The two racing games that are out for the DS (Ridge Racer and Asphalt) are fun for a while, but the controls are awkwards without an analog stick and the tiny screen makes it impossible to see what's coming up ahead of you. Probably why I'm so eagerly looking forward to Midway Arcade Treasures 3 with the San Francisco Rush games. Those were great driving games.

Even great puzzle games like Zoo Keeper are disappointing. Sure it's a great game; simple, easy to understand and pick up and play for a few minutes. But would it have been so difficult to include a non-timed mode, where the object was to clear the screen instead of frantically trying to find matches. It would have added so much more strategy to the game.

Super Mario 64 was an ambitious remake of a classic, and the new content was entertaining. But without the analog stick, the touch screen doesn't do a very good job of emulating the original controls. If I want to play Mario 64, I'd rather do it on the N64 than the DS.

Retro Atari Classics is decent enough. The problem is that the new "twist" on the classic games isn't a twist. it's just some new artwork and horrible touch screen controls. True, it works well with games like Breakout. But Asteroids is impossible to play with the stylus. And why do you need more than one cartridge for multiplayer Pong??

Yoshi Touch & Go was a great, innovative idea and the game plays very well. It's challenging enough without being impossible, and it's fun to play. But it hasn't evolved enough from the original tech demo displayed at E3 2004. It works well as a puzzle game, but it could've been expanded so well into a platformer with different levels.

Anyway, that's enough rambling for tonight. Hopefully online games like Animal Crossing will have me as addicted to the DS as their GC counterparts.

I've been playing a lot of new games lately and I've never been so impressed and disappointed in the same games before. Take Mortal Kombat Deception for the Gamecube. The PS2 and XBOX versions were great leaps from Deadly Alliance. A great fighting engine in its own right, I felt like Deadly Alliance was missing a lot of what makes a Mortal Kombat game: fatalities and interactive arenas. I loved the PS2 and XBOX Deception games, and when I heard that the GCN version would have Goro and Shao Kahn as playable characters I was that much more excited. I don't really care much for online play - mostly because I've never tried it, but I'd rather have the person I'm playing against/with right there next to me. So while I was really impressed with MK for the GCN, I was also disappointed at the lack of other system exclusives. The coffins used to unlock characters in the PS2 and XBOX versions only hold more koins. They could have at least included MK1.

Next on my list of great games that are disappointing is Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. This game is a great example of the innovation that Nintendo keeps talking about with different ways to interact with video games. Jungle Beat is a great concept and a lot of fun to play, but the Bongo controller isn't always perfectly responsive and can therefore be frustrating when you keep taking damage during what should be a simple platform jump.

I've been eagerly awaiting new games for the Nintendo DS because I feel like the system has a lot of potential that so far it has failed to live up to. Games like Super Mario 64 are great for nostalgic purposes, but the fumbling controls take the replay value down a huge notch. So I was really excited about Yoshi Touch & Go because I'm relying on Nintendo's first party efforts to keep the system from becoming the next Virtual Boy. It's a great concept, but I wish they'd made it more of a traditional platformer than the genre-bending puzzle thing that it is. I'd rather make my way through different levels to beat the game than keep repeating the same process over and over again to get a high score.

Well that's it for my great games that could have been entry. I think I'm starting to like just rambling on about these games. Even if no one reads this stuff it's fun to keep track of what I'm doing so I can look back and remember some of it. Maybe I'll try writing some reviews.

So this is my first entry. Don't really know what I'm doing. I'll try keeping track of the games I buy and the ones I'm playing. Still trying to figure out how Gamespot determines how much your games are worth. IGN goes by what they would charge for the game, but I can't find anywhere on Gamespot that tells you. I also don't know how they determine your rank or level. When I started inputing my games into the collection area I was at level 1, and when I finished I was up to level 4. Don't know how that happened.