

2 in Japan would be too difficult for American gamers, so they took an unrelated game called Doki Doki Panic, slapped Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Princess Peach onto it, and called it a day, confusing the hell out of American kids in the late ‘80s who wanted to know what happened to the goombas and fireflowers from the first game.Ĭastlevania: A Dracula Masterpiece 90 Years in the Making By Matthew Byrd Nintendo thought the real Super Mario Bros. Car Battler Joe has always been one of the more underrated games on the GBA, but at least now its readily available on the Wii U. The story is pretty basic RPG fare, with slight Mad Max influences, but the 7-style battles are where the gameplay really shines, and they still hold up pretty well today. There are only four car types available, but each can be outfitted with a huge number of weapons, and Overdrive features that can affect the speed and handling of your car. The Pinball of the DeadĪt its core, Car Battler Joe is a cutesy Twisted Metal RPG. It’s just a shame that the light sensor means it can’t really be ported to other systems. Produced by Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima, this is one of the most unusual, creative, and just plain fun handheld games released for any system.

Inputting your time zone would also affect the gameplay in various ways, including the time of day. If you didn’t have any sunlight, you had to play Boktai like a stealth game and avoid enemies. The cartridge for this action RPG shipped with a light sensor that you had to charge in the sun to fill up your sunlight guns, which were used to fight vampires in-game. There had never before been a game like Boktai before, and there may never be a game just like it again. BoktaiĢ003 | Konami Computer Entertainment Japan You could still skate around as a pixelated version of your favorite skater with complete freedom, and somehow the trick controls still worked pretty well on the tiny handheld. Vicarious Visions created large, static isometric levels that were nearly identical to the console versions.

The solution to this problem was ingenious. Of course, because the handheld was just a little more powerful than a SNES, it couldn’t handle the 3D graphics of the PSX, N64, and Dreamcast version.

This was one of the biggest titles around the turn of the millennium, so obviously, Activision wanted to put a version of it on the GBA. The long-running Tony Hawkseries really did peak early with the second entry, which added bigger levels and more opportunities to connect tricks for huge combos.
