Does EarthBound count? It’s sort of a sci-fi fantasy story which mostly takes place in a contemporary western setting (most of the game occurs in Eagleland, America filtered via Japan). There’s ancient evils, pay phones, psychic powers, a cafe, a bunch of zombies and a multi-level mall. Not all of the game is urban, with suburban, rural, swamp and alien areas, but there’s several cities to explore.

It’s such a shame we don’t get many modern indie interpretations of these single-screen racers. There’s a clone on Wii U and Switch (and probably other platforms) called Rock 'N Racing Off Road DX which I played to completion even though it was buggier, uglier and less fun than Super Off Road just because I’ve already played SOR so much. The game crashed immediately after the final race and I promptly deleted it.

The last one I know that was really great was Konami’s super underrated Driift Mania for the original Wii. Great handling, fun tracks and colorful visuals made it one of my favorite WiiWare games, which sadly today means you can’t legally get it anywhere. The craziest feature was the 8-way multiplayer using four Wii Remotes and four Classic Controllers, so each player is tethered to another by the Classic Controller cable. Worth tracking down if you want to play a “modern” (14 years old, pff) single-screen racer.

Years ago, I tried to max out everybody’s stats by New Game+ing over and over to collect the 10 or so Tabs you find across the entire game to increase stats by one point at a time. I was not successful. I think I made it through three or four NG+ cycles, though.

Notably, the NES port of Joust was programmed by future Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. The game was developed in two months, for release in September 1983, but was ultimately shelved. With his Joust seemingly not happening, Iwata developed Balloon Fight instead, which saw release in 1985. Eventually, his Joust was also released, in 1987. For what it’s worth, I love them both.

• Game Developer: A former mentor recalls the early career of Satoru Iwata

• SNES

  • the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, just good platformers; first one hasn’t aged as well as people think, if you don’t enjoy it skip ahead to 2 and come back later if you feel like it
  • The Lost Vikings 1 and 2, fantastic character-switching co-operative (but playable solo) level-based puzzle-platformer; don’t play the sequel on newer platforms like PlayStation, they tried to modernize the graphics and only succeeded in making them hideous, stick with SNES
  • Star Fox 2, as long as you enjoy dated 3D and poor framerates, this is the most ambitious 3D game on any 16-bit console, with a very replayable campaign full of hidden unlockables that differs on each play
  • Super Mario All-Stars & Super Mario World, just an enhanced compilation of 4-5 seminal 2D platformers; while you could use save states on the NES versions, the SNES versions all support native saves, so easier to pick up and play
  • Tetris Attack, nothing to do with Tetris, just a match-three puzzler with deep, engrossing mechanics that can keep you interested long-term; also Panel de Pon with a translation hack if you want more
  • Top Gear, fantastic competitive racer with the line-scroll road effect you know from classic arcade games like OutRun and a killer soundtrack; pick the white car
  • Yoshi’s Island, another classic platformer

• Mega Drive/Genesis

  • Gauntlet IV, better than the arcade original, this is M2 (now known for developing emulators for many classic systems) flexing with some RPG mechanics added to the traditional Gauntlet gameplay
  • The Lost Vikings, SNES version is better but there’s a few brand new levels in this one if you want more
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles, basically the first Sonic that noticed it’s a home game, so it has saving and improved replayability with multiple characters, paths and unlockables

• Game Boy

  • Donkey Kong, this is not a port of arcade Donkey Kong, it’s a full-blown puzzle platformer you can play one level at a time
  • Kirby’s Dream Land 2, easy-to-finish platformer but with tons of content if you’re playing “properly”, using the sort of rock-paper-scissors logic to use the right powers to enter the secret areas
  • Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, just a proper “mid-period” (SNES-esque) Mario platformer which you can play over as long as you like

• Game Boy Color

  • Balloon Fight GB, predates Flappy Bird by literal decades but like if that was a proper game with a campaign
  • The Mummy, based on the Brendan Fraser movie and an awesome Konami puzzle-platformer with short individual levels and password save (use save states on emulator), super underrated
  • Pokémon Puzzle Challenge, Tetris Attack but with Pokémon if you prefer that theming
  • Wendy: Every Witch Way, based on some kind of comic book I think, developed by WayForward who developed the Shantae games and then branched off into Yacht Club Games (Shovel Knight), Wendy is a gravity-flipping platformer where you’re in control of which direction is up or down

• Game Boy Advance

  • Advance Wars 1 & 2, adorable turn-based strategy war game with a campaign based around small, self-contained levels, except for a few huge ones
  • Drill Dozer, developed by Game Freak (Pokémon), is a sort of level-based Metroidvania platformer with lots of backtracking to older levels as you unlock new abilities
  • F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, the only true sequel to SNES F-Zero, don’t at me
  • Game Boy Advance Video: Shrek, endlessly replayable
  • Metroid: Fusion and Zero Mission, they’re Metroid games
  • Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 e-Reader version, I think you can get this officially on Switch somehow, but you’ve been to the Internet before; this officially-released modified version of the original game includes a bunch of brand new levels previously distributed only on scannable cards, I’m not telling the whole story but they remix elements from the first four mainline Mario games into basically a whole original game. This is New Super Mario Bros. this is Super Mario Bros. 5, still don’t at me

@CheeseNoodle Hate to disappoint you both, but it’s best known for being extremely bad. Wikipedia includes this note:

The game was widely panned by critics, and has since been considered by many to be one of the worst video games of all time

It has a 32 on Metacritic, and among its reviews are a 1/10 from IGN and 2/10 from Game Informer.

If you’re interested in a long-form video about it, there’s this 21-minute post-mortem including quotes from the developers and stuff. Like a lot of cases, it seems like publisher interference got in the way of a lot of what the team wanted to do.

Don’t sell the bots short, they can probably sell you a pill that helps you conflate things.

He can’t help being named Jimmy Wales.