In no particular order:

Breath of Fire III
Breath of Fire IV
Torneko: The Last Hope
Tales of Destiny
Tales of Destiny 2
Strider 2
Mega Man 8
Mega Man X4
Mega Man X5
C: The Contra Adventure...just kidding!
Actually, Mega Man Legends.

The first stage of “Mega Man Zero 2” is one of the best possible notes a game could start on. Our hero, garbed in a poncho, fatigued from the battles he’s fought since the prior installment, limps his way through a canyon in the midst of a sandstorm. The storm dies down, and a battalion of Neo Arcadian foot soldiers flank Zero from behind. He tosses the poncho aside, and a techno/Western theme music kicks in. The menu screen from the previous game is withered, obscuring and disabling options tha...

My initial impression of “Mega Man Zero” when I first played it was: This game is hard as fuck! I was humiliated by the first real boss, Aztec Falcon. The claustrophobic quarters where you fight him caused me to panic. He dwarfed my little Zero character in size, and he nimbly bounded and dashed all over the place. He shot harpoons and sent surges of electricity through the ground and up the walls. To top all of this off, I had to defeat this monster before the platform we were on descended onto...

“Mega Man Zero Collection” contains one of the greatest action game anthologies of recent years and perhaps all time as well. In the realm of vigorous thumb and finger muscle exercise, you can’t do better than this on a portable game system. You can hardly do better on the so-called “home” consoles either. The "Mega Man Zero" series is among the upper echelon of games that have you sprinting and bounding across wild obstacle courses while terminating drones with extreme prejudice.

If I were to grade “Super Street Fighter IV” as a product, it’d get a rating below ‘5/10’. Does that sound harsh to you? Well, think of all the poor suckers who dropped sixty bones on the original “Street Fighter IV.” Now they have to spend forty more dollars on this new version, which will cannibalize the community of the original one. In this age where companies like Bungie and BioWare release big DLC packs for their games, this is inexcusable.

“Street Fighter IV” is a respectable fighting game that's easy to pick up and pretty easy to master. It has low ambitions, which essentially boil down to repeating what Capcom did over a decade ago, but with flashier visual flair. A lot of gamers won’t care, because gaming culture has reached a stage where it is content to mine and relive a nostalgic past. Fair enough, especially if the throwback is fun.

It’s difficult to trash a game like “Final Fantasy II”, because you part with it on such a high note. The last dungeon is an awesome archive of treasures, guarded by some of the fiercest monsters you’ll ever find. These beasts can be very tricky, inflicting a magical death sentence on your whole team or countering your strongest magic with something even more devastating. One enemy even invites you to exploit its weakness, a trick I refused to fall for. On top of that, you’re in control of a hig...

Among the many Final Fantasies, “Final Fantasy V” is reported to be the favorite of the series godfather, Hironobu Sakaguchi. This would surprise a lot of us Western gamers, who largely favor the sixth and seventh games. Video role-playing fans on this side of the cultural hemisphere tend to judge these games by their “story”, which is probably why a lot of people tend to dismiss the once mysterious and out of reach FFV. When a lot of American gamers finally got the chance to play the “Lost Fina...

Whenever I finish an RPG, I usually wait a year before replaying so that I can forget most of the dungeon layouts. You see, knowing where you are and where to go can be kind of boring. “Design,” as some call the tendency toward static maps, is overrated in this genre. This is why I find roguelike dungeon crawlers to be so addicting. No two floors are the same across different playthroughs, and you never you know what awaits you past the next exit. “Torneko: The Last Hope” refines a particular va...

“Chocobo’s Dungeon 2” starts out very well, with chipper music and some exchanges between a chatty moogle and his mute chocobo cohort. Don’t know what a moogle or chocbo are? Then this game isn’t for you. Actually, this game isn’t for a lot of people, you’re just the first group to be filtered out. Next group: People who can’t stand cutesy art. This game is so syrupy, it’ll put cavities in your eyes. Out with you, now.

So ends another episode in the adventures of “Wonder Boy”.