It's a round number, so I'm noting it as a milestone of sorts. Which gives me an excuse to celebrate heavily today. CHEERS!

And then, right in the middle of all of that are light-hearted elements such as a horribly flatulent fairy who propels you across an ocean with her gas, a random encounter bull-man called "Retardotaur" and random townspeople who break the fourth wall to remind you that you're playing a video game. Wacky stuff like this works in a game like EarthBound, because most of that game has a somewhat whimsical outlook on things. With Vay, it's just distracting nonsense, like if Hamlet took ...

Not only was blood removed from the game, but the boss named "Blood" got his name changed to the less-intimidating "Boots" (to reflect his kick-heavy offense).

When you get to a town, count on walking through about 20 screens to find the five or so homes that you can actually enter to find information, items or a place to rest. Midway through the game, when you have to scale a pair of towers, enjoy seeing the same few screens as you ascend each one's multiple, identical floors.

In Dead Moon, only during boss fights, your ship turns around and faces left once you reach the screen’s right edge. You’ll feel like you're in an actual arena, struggling to survive a battle with a true rival. The game makes full use of this mechanic, too; bosses will fly all over the screen, forcing you to constantly remain on the move in order to stay alive.

When you resume play, you'll find yourself again controlling that same slow-moving, impotent piece of junk with which you started. The big difference is that now you'll possibly be starting from a mid-level checkpoint or even a more difficult late-game area. Odds are that you'll quickly lose the rest of your lives and realize that you're playing one of those shooters where, if you can't complete it on one life, you might as well reset and start again from scratch.

Bloody Warriors is best described as an RPG for RPG junkies. It's not good enough to inspire players to delve into the genre, but diehard fans like me are able to gain some enjoyment from taking another trip down a well-worn path.

Magic is generally bought in stores. At least I think it is… I never found much use for casting spells when I could use high-tier skills to erase thousands of hit points from enemies in a single attack. Since you regain all health after each battle, it's not like healing spells are all that useful, and characters tend to have 10 or more life points, which means they can fall that many times in battles before actually perishing. Thus, fights tend to be onslaughts of all-out offense until all the ...

Some of the things which make combat so easy also add to its charm, because they make fights far more interactive than one would expect from a turn-based RPG. While tapping the attack button at the proper time during a character's turn will essentially make every blow they land a critical hit, it also adds to the fun, as this is one game where you won't be mindlessly tapping the attack button.

And most importantly: once upon a time, three brave heroes advanced upon the castle of the fierce demon lord Mudo in an attempt to bring his reign of terror to an end. The foul beast was prepared, though, and cast a horrible spell that caused the heroic party members to be frozen momentarily in air before finally vanishing. In a bed in a remote village, the leader of the brave triumvirate wakes up… to what apparently is the same boring, rustic life he always has lived.

Sadly, Salamander is a rarity — a Gradius-style game that doesn't operate by these rules. Instead, you get the simple-n-generic sort of system where enemies drop power-ups represented by various icons and, by collecting them, you automatically get whatever goodie they represent. This takes some of the fun out of this title, as the ability to customize the way you power up your ship was quite a nice touch.

The farther you advance into the adventure, the more worthless the hero becomes when compared to his two companions. He is the best melee fighter, which is great for mowing through the common enemies that reside on the paths your party must navigate while traversing the overworld and any dungeons, but he possesses no magic of his own. When left to fight alone, the best the hero can do is charge up his weapon of choice (which isn't the quickest of processes) and hope to connect with an enemy by u...

In Gradius II, you are immediately greeted by the choice between four different weapon sets (as opposed to only one in the original) and then you advance to a very attractive opening stage loaded with fiery asteroids. Making this level particularly neat is the way you can scroll up and down while moving to the right. If the particular path you're charting through the asteroids seems too fraught with danger, it's simplicity itself to go over one instead of under it in order to fight a diff...

At seemingly random moments, a man will descend from the sky to take a photograph of your party before vanishing the way he came. One NPC's desire to create a memorable dungeon leads to him changing his body into one. This is one of those games that can be difficult to put down simply because you'll want to experience the next bizarre situation.

First, a company comes out with a game that has potential and is terrific in some aspects, but it lacks a bit overall. In the case of Rare's Donkey Kong Country, the Super Nintendo played host to an absolutely gorgeous platformer that just didn't live up to the (admittedly very high) standard set for that system by Super Mario World. It was solid and it tended to be enjoyable, but no new ground was broken and things could get repetitive. It seemed to be the ultimate in playing it...

Pay a visit to the island maze-fortress of Crete and the minute you step in the door, you'll be cut to shreds by various Amazon warriors who are both durable and capable of moving their shields around to block attacks much like The Adventures of Link's Ironknuckles. And I haven't even mentioned Phrygia's MANY snake-dragons that take more damage than most bosses while blasting the crap out of you with fire. Brutal…

When my questing first took me here, I admit that it didn't take long for me to get lost, as I wasn't really paying that much attention to the in-game map. D.C. is essentially a world unto itself. A confusing, labyrinthine world with many twists, turns and dead ends. Words can't say how welcome this place was, especially when you consider the rest of the game's world takes place in a pretty unappealing place.

The original StarTropics was mostly confined to a random series of tropical islands, and everything blended together after a while. In Zoda's Revenge, you control Mike Jones as he travels from a prehistoric land, to ancient Egypt, to other areas such as a Transylvanian castle and King Arthur's Britain. Each chapter contains a minimum of one dungeon to explore as you search for a collection of Tetris -style blocks known as Tetrads. You need to reach them before various incarn...

While it doesn't take much reading between the lines for a person to at least grasp the fundamentals of this, Nintendo's censorship did take away some of the impact this sort of plot might have, leaving us with the sort of standard fantasy fare where you'd almost expect there to be a disclaimer in the credits stating that any resemblance to actual belief systems is purely coincidental.

To keep battles from being stale, a decent number of them have special stipulations which can work in your favor, the monsters' favor or in an unexpected way — such as when you fight the alien leader in an outer space dimension and find that, in homage to the Alien movies, you've entered "Ripley mode" where the one female member of your party has her stats raised dramatically.

In fact, the beginning of the game is pretty much one big cliche. Shortly after the game begins, Will unintentionally gets on the wrong side of the local king and queen and is forced to flee the area with the rulers' spoiled and naive daughter. Those two join up with a small group of Will's friends and explore the world to find mysterious artifacts and eventually save everything from a fate most dire. Pretty cut and dry on the surface, but as you dig deeper, you'll find that Illusion of Gaia<...