KingMike

@IronMan30 And it's less than $1200. Truly a bargain.

@BrazillianCara Yoshi's Cookie is actually a third-party game. Nintendo had to license it when they released the NES version on Wii VC, and it was the only game (that I remember) was completely deleted (no redownloads, most delisted games still gave you that).
Nintendo owns the NES (and I think GB) source code but not the whole game. The SNES version however, I believe was programmed by a different company.

@Rooty I don't imagine that's too far off in length from the Genesis Sonic games.
I mean, it's pretty obvious that Sonic was their inspiration.

Now @Tim_Rattray is going to make me thing of how much they Exceled at making this list.

@MegaChem If only the actual game could've had that many colors, it's probably hurt less (then again, Ocarina of Time 3D hurt my eyes after only a few minutes and that had about 15 years of hardware tech advancement on it).

I sense the article writer is trying to sway the votes, and it's working.
The American art does have that '90s techno vibe going for it, which it fits.

YouTube content ID bots exist because YouTube got sued for massive copyright infringement on its site within the first year. We'll see where this "out-out" policy takes OpenAI.

@StewdaMegaManNerd OH MY GOD! I can['t BELIEVE how stable the Switch 2 is already! I was afraid that since it was so new it was going to be absolutely deficient in stability but here is Nintendo to prove us wrong!

(I know it was counting Switch 1 updates by that number, but there just had to be something to say.)

@aznable If you get there without enough magic, you just can't win. That's a fair way to design something, you say.
And how would you have known about needing Thunder magic anyways?

Now that I know about it, it's also great that in the conversion from the disk format in Japan to cartridge for the west, clearly they looked at ways to utilize the extra capabilities of the cartridge hardware. In 1988 there was someone at Nintendo who realized that having such a high quality digitized sound of Ganon laughing at the player when they Game Over was a great idea. Laughing at the player when they fail. Every time they fail. "Because they could" was important. I bet the testers knew their game well enough they didn't fail a thousand times to make them question "should they?" after getting laughed at for their thousandth failure.
I'm glad at least by the time I played the game long enough to ragequit it in the 2000s was when it was pretty much expected to have a TV with a remote with a mute button. I'm only imagining how irritating that would be for kids (who'd have even less patience than I did) playing that in 1989 who could well be playing on TVs that would have been old even then, old enough to lack a mute button.
I know the Japanese version had a normal, silent, Game Over. Though I can only imagine the Japanese EXP system would have its own problems.

I know that's a huge rant over one small detail. But I think that's a pretty fitting thought. Okay game, you want to disrespect me with that? I can show that feeling right back at you by not finishing you.

@Bass_X0 Topsy-Turvy is very unlikely to be rereleased due to the gyro gimmick.
The idea was that as you turn your GBA, it also rotates the gravity around Yoshi so that while Yoshi remains standing upright, flatlands become hills, etc. The background scenery doesn't change, but the gravity physics do. The idea was that you'd have to consider the position of stuff IRL rather than just its relation to the screen boundaries.
It's a visual and control gimmick that was hard for me to follow on the real hardware, and I'd imagine would be virtually incomprehensible on NSO.
I mean, it probably could be technically done with a feature to rotate the screen (and needing to add gyro buttons) but such necessary additions to its emulator are thing I wouldn't trust Nintendo's emu devs to have a commitment to achieve. M2 maybe.

I haven't played Twisted but I imagine that would have some difficulty too.

@aznable I didn't play it until the mid 2000s, and even then while it was a game I wanted to like, I couldn't.
Link's only weapon is a sword with a super tiny attack range, and there's way too many of those knights where it's a high-low guessing game hitting them.
Great Palace is a super long and tedious maze that I recall takes like 15 minutes to go through, until you get to a boss that requires a spell that takes over half your magic bar to make it possible to damage. So if you don't have it, you just lose. Maybe if the dungeon wasn't like 15 minutes of tedium to try again, I wouldn't feel so bad. But I beat the original Zelda and Ganon's dungeon in that was no where near as awful.

Sorry but maybe because it was a couple decades later and I had plenty of other games available I could "git good" at many other games that don't have some design flaws that alone make me want to stop playing them.
I am aware that games in the '80s were often "challenging" at any cost but Great Palace is something that could've been less a pain.
I also have not finished NES Metroid solely because I don't want to have farm Energy refills each time to cover for a massive flaw that even Zelda 1 didn't have: it's okay if Link can only die in like two hits after every restart because that game didn't have energy generators that remain active during door transitions in which they took away the player's control but didn't give them i-frames. I can take the rest of NES Metroid's designs that are a part of its era and hardware limitations that might not sit as well today.
Maybe at some point I'll give it another try after I've seen a streamer discover the workaround of leaving powerups behind, but it's really something that even in 1986 Nintendo should've looked at and said it was an issue.

Who in the world wants their attention immediately drawn to Baby Mario's behind?

Super Mario Galaxy 2 is now over 15 years old.
Some people haven't played them yet and don't own a Wii and don't want to buy a Wii just to play them. The value proposition might be different for those people.

I got Super Mario All-Stars as a child. I didn't have a NES as a child so that was my first experience with those games. My parents paid $59.99 (and tax) for that game. (That's almost $134 adjusted.) Should they have felt cheated because "those (were even then) 'old games'"?

Fighter's History DYNAMITE!!

And Fatal Fury 3. That might have been the game I hear the best ending crashes the game when run on an English BIOS. But maybe the was the AES (home) hardware.

@Friendly "Who wants to deal with the USA these days?" Well, I would think that customers of the USA branch of Nintendo would sure like to.
As great as it would be for Nintendo of AMERICA to employ people of its own country to provide support, that obviously has not been the way for a long time as companies have long since outsourced their support services to foreign countries, including agencies whose employees may or may not be simultaneously literal scamming people at the same time.

I am remembering that Ben Heck gave a story of how he worked at GameStop (or one of the stores they bought out) in the '90s and had one kid call in every day asking for Aaahh!! Real Monsters. Then he didn't know it was a real game (and I'll guess he was a little too old to have been a Nick watcher to know of the cartoon) so it became a joke between him and his friends.

@Debo626 I don't know about further context, but that kanji means "shop" or "dealer".

@Questionable_Duck Well, this week marks the second Japanese Bomberman grandma I've heard of. Who knows if either them have visited this site before.

I recall Game Boy getting one mention when my mom used to record and watch it every day when I was a child. But maybe I'm misremembering.

I do also remember Murder, She Wrote having a child concealing sensitive information or something inside a Game Boy, Will Smith Enemy of the State style.

(though in the case of the Will Smith movie, why a 1998 film used a TurboExpress as a film prop... I guess some director found a thrift store maybe, I don't know, but I suppose the fact that apparently PCMCIA cards fit into the TurboChip slot maybe helped?)

I feel like the Age of Imprisonment is one with a lot of Big Game Key Cards.

Surely, that's an unoriginal joke by this point...

@GoproGO Spongebob only debuted about half a year before the millennium, in the US (May 1999, I think.) That just barely counts as '90s.

Ren & Stimpy is yes, either separate license, or a desire to not be associated with the creator. (I recall Spike TV ran an "adult" version of the cartoon which got pulled REALLY fast in the 2000s. I've heard it described as "Nickelodeon censored it too much, Spike didn't censor it enough." among fan reactions to the initial airing.)

As to limiting access to specialized game controllers, I can remember that even in the Wii era, the limited edition SNES Classic Controller was never offered to the American region's physical prize redemption shop. I saved up my points from registering many physical games but I was never offered it.

@Misima I think Animaniacs was the last licensed cartoon Nickelodeon ran reruns of, in the early 2000s. I think after that, it seemed like Nick had moved to airing its original content only.

I do remember for a time in the '90s, they ran the 1960s Alvin and the Chipmunks cartoon (with the opening edited to have Nick logos throughout) before briefly running the '80s Alvin series.

@Uncle_Franklin It was a puzzle platform, or as the first post called it, "escort mission" game.
I thought it was an alright game, just way too short. Which still puts it far above most SNES license games.

@Mana_Knight On the SNES and Genesis, I think these and the Ren & Stimpy games were the only Nickelodeon games.
The Rugrats and Doug games didn't come out until the 1998 revival run of Rugrats (which was around the time Disney got ownership of Doug).
I remember because I had grown up on watching reruns of the 1991 run of Rugrats.

@HammerGalladeBro Rocko is a decent game for what it is, a puzzle-platformer. Or "escort mission" as you call it, that's exactly what genre of game it was.
It's just that, it only had about a rental's worth of content. I owned the game as a kid, and even I felt bad that I got my parents to pay full price for it.

I hadn't played GUTS much, but I recall it was definitely a "read the manual" sports game.
One bad sign is that the platforming stages used Y to jump and B to run. You can tell they hadn't played any other SNES platformers with those controls.

"Tournament Edition" That was an obscure unreleased variant of the SNES port, I've heard? Possibly even unannounced.
I suppose it would make sense since the released version said "Competition Edition" on the box.

Does that collection included the censored Japanese version of the SNES MK2 port? Considering the historical significance of the western original, that has to be a curiosity counterpoint.

@Mgalens If there is a distinction between one player character having control over another "subcharacter", then Megami Tensei might not qualify (the subordinate characters are their own party slot).
However, Final Fantasy X definitely would. Whereas previous Final Fantasy games allowed players to summon beasts, those were effectively just a magical spell. However in X, once Yuna summoned one of the "Aeons", that "Aeon" became a playable character for the rest of the battle or until defeated. I can't remember if it replaced the entire party or just Yuna, but it definitely qualified as one player character having control over a subcharacter.

14/22 commercially released games is actually more than I thought I would make it, if those are confirmed to be included.

I can only imagine Nester's Funky Bowling and Panic Bomber are likely to make it out of the missing games.

That list includes two of the wallet-destructing "Elite Four" rare Japanese games.
Virtual Lab, the third one, is arguable as the worst game on the console, for that it was the one most unfinished before they released it. The box itself is a thing of amazing awfulness.

@Aneira It might be shocking that Blizzard made that one.

I haven't heard much spoken of the Superman games that Sunsoft made, that is the Genesis game and their unreleased NES game (better known as Sunman, a game that was completely unknown until a prototype cartridge was preserved and people instantly knew it had to have been intended as a Superman game, even before an earlier proto verifying that fact turned up a few years later).

@rvcolem1 DS would've been perfect for Lemmings but sadly that IP is within Sony's hold.

@ValentineMeikin No way this is passing. What amazes me is that Nintendo has the balls to take such an old idea and claim it as their own.
The first thing that immediately comes to mind is Final Fantasy X, a 24 year old game. And that's far from the first example, I know.

@KITG_GROUP There are FAR FAR FAR worse games than Bubsy. The bottom of the barrel on NES and SNES garbage games is far worse. I haven't looked at it but GBA has to have its own share of a trash.
All that will make the original Bubsy look like a masterpiece in comparison.
I understand why one of my favorite streamers The RetroPals use the original Bubsy as their median line for rating platformers "Is it better or worse than Bubsy?"

@Tom-Massey The Super Famicom version publisher Poppo I think only otherwise published Iron Commando, a beat-em-up that can be argued has its own problems.
Nintendo themselves actually published the original game in some European countries. (there are two license variants of the PAL version)

But it in the case of the original Bubsy, I can only recommend that the Glide button should be used almost as much as the run button in Mario.

I have to pick the cover with the lady. If not for that, for the reason the other one looks like preorder placeholder art you'd have seen in the Electronics Boutique catalog back in the day.

@h3s No, PAL Super Metroid is a different ROM. The Japan/USA version has English and Japan language options (which effectively just disables or enables Japanese subtitles in the opening cutscene as the actual gameplay text is always English. Despite that I could've sworn renting the game from Blockbuster as a child and getting a version with a Spanish option. But I haven't been able to see any confirmation of such a version existing or anyone else playing, and that would be a really odd thing to have a false memory of since I'm not a Spanish speaker.)
The PAL version however had French and German options which I assume function the same as the "Japanese" option in the NTSC version.

I haven't heard of any SNES (original market) games being completely identical across all regions so I think at the least all PAL version game ROMs are unique.

@Thomystic It should look the same because it's the same developer.

I wouldn't expect a translation.
I can only remember this for the DS sequel selling so bad that my local Target store gave it the disrespect of bundling it with Deal or No Deal as one of their custom-made two-game "value" bundles. (as if DoND wasn't already the definition of a shovelware game, the WORST choice of a game show to make a video game adaptation people were expected to pay money for, its RNG was reportedly busted and you could "win" the top prize every time)

The realization that Smash Bros. was Samus' only appearance on the N64.
She also didn't get a proper game on the Wii U, did she?
The DS only got a couple spinoffs.

@Tasuki I'm said I didn't get the guide but I am so glad I at least got an EarthBound cart before the prices got crazy. I liked nearly every RPG I could play (even Secret of the Stars, yet I don't know why) but EB was a pretty special one to have enjoyed in the rental days.
The only one I recall not getting much out of was Ultima VI. Too much for my teenage brain to process but I hope I will someday give it another shot. I mean I have asked myself for future difficulty as I even was glad to have picked up a copy of the SNES port of The Savage Empire. I believe it was an American game for which only the Japanese localization got released, yet even that took some patience to get a copy.

@Tasuki I passed up grabbing a copy from the rental store in 2000 for like $15 with the box cut to fit the rental case. I was tempted but passed up since I was most into collecting RPGs.
Now I have a complete Japanese copy which still cost more.

I'll have to go with the NA box art.
(even though that image is actually a bootleg, though the differences from the real box are very pedantic)

The European boxart is the most sensible but also rather dull to look out.

Japan just has our guy and his livestock popping out of horseshoe dimensional portal in the sky (at least it's on the ground in the NA art).

That said, the Japanese version is the only box you can reasonably purchase these days, so I guess it has that in its favor.

30:00 "No regional differences between the games." Indeed, Mario Paint and Super Metroid are the only two SNES games where the Japanese and USA versions have identical ROMs.
(That would be limited to first-party games. Despite that Japanese developers weren't required to, NoA effectively required that every third-party game at least have "Licensed by Nintendo". And even though Acclaim was the only western publisher I can immediately recall to establish a Japanese subsidiary and every game they published in Japan seemed nearly identical to the USA version in content (such they could have been recycled), the Japanese versions all at least REMOVED that "Licensed" text.)
(oh so, I recall Activision also created a JP branch, but they only published two SFC games in Japan, and one PS1 game according to GameFAQs.)

Unfortunately a lot of little homebrew shmups are probably lost to time in the form of the shmup-maker Dezaemon on the FC, SFC and N64. Save data has most certainly been lost from most copies at this point.

@Anti-Matter That's not really the point of why people look at Mario Paint these days.
Just like whoever was asking for a "sequel" (which it did have and hopefully NSO will give them the opportunity to formally release what they did have on it, Sound Factory/Fantasy) or "remake".
The point is to be able to make something within the limitations given of the hardware, or to experience the feeling when not nearly as many people had access to far more expensive computers with far more sophisticated software.

It would've been more amazing to backup the cartridge SRAM data from them (assuming none of the copies contained anything obviously personal). But I suppose a video would have to do.

Of course Nintendo is going to do something on the 40th anniversary of one of the most significant video games they ever produced.
The release of the original Super Mario Maker was how the celebrated the 30th.

@orbots Yeah, it gained a bit of attention when it was first released as GameStop took preorders for the game and then silently canceled them, leaving it until the announcement it was Walmart exclusive for them to learn why.

Wasn't this the game doomed to be plastered with a Walmart sticker on the box?
(Which when it failed and Walmart resold the remaining stock to other retailers such as my local Best Buy, it got resold with the sticker covered up.)

@Johnny_Arthur Acclaim bought out at least two developers, Probe (who did a lot of ports in the early '90s, likely bought after they did Genesis Mortal Kombat) and Iguana Entertainment (who made Aero the Acrobat).
Probably more.
Acclaim was mostly a publisher, not a developer.

Acclaim did swipe the NBA Jam trademark from Midway, which is why they had to rename them after a couple games.