My lifelong love of role-playing games began with a free copy of Dragon Warrior—part of a promotion by Nintendo Power. The game was primitive, as Western ports of Japanese RPGs lagged years behind. Dragon Quest III came out in early 1988, just three months after Final Fantasy , but we didn't get Dragon Warrior III until four years later . (The name had to be altered because someone had trademarked "Dragon Quest" in the U.S.) By then the Super Nintendo was already out; Dragon Warrior III made almost no impact. Enix declined to localize V and VI. (Fortunately, Squaresoft and Enix merged in 2003, and the new company ported both to the DS for international release!)  Dragon Warrior III and IV are easily the best RPGs on the NES. DW3 does everything Final Fantasy does and more. Instead of choosing your party of four only at the beginning, you control a central hero or heroine (you choose the gender, although they are called Ortega's "son" either way), who can re...

Ridge Racer 64 brought Namco's arcade/PlayStation racing series to a Nintendo console for the first time. Releasing between R4 and Ridge Racer V, it includes tracks from the original Ridge Racer arcade game as well as the PlayStation sequel, Ridge Racer Revolution. (I never played either, though I did enjoy Rad Racer and Cruis'n USA as a child.) It's a fun game, if you like old-fashioned arcade-style racing. The racing formula found in many other games holds here: you choose one of four cars, its color, automatic or manual transmission, then a track to race on against computer-controlled cars. Cars are rated on four stats: speed, handling, acceleration, and grip. You can also play multiplayer (up to 4) with split screen. Courses are arranged as three sets of three. The three starting tracks are a cityscape (the short track from the original arcade game), mountains and valleys (the easy track from Ridge Racer Revolution), and a new track called Renegade set in the desert o...

Mega Man X reinvented the Mega Man series to universal acclaim, and X2 stays the course. The strength of the formula, which rewards you incrementally as you upgrade the robot hero X, sustained my interest despite the game's difficulty. X again faces eight "Mavericks" (animalian robots) as well as, this time around, three additional "X-Hunters," named Violen, Agile, and Serges (a mistranslation of the French Sagesse, which means wise ). Before you select a stage, you are shown in which stage each X-Hunter is hiding at the moment. Every stage has a secret boss room where they can be fought. Each holds a piece of the robot Zero, who nobly sacrificed himself in the previous game. If X finds and defeats all three hidden bosses, Zero is reassembled. This adds replay value to the game for anyone who doesn't hunt down all the X-Hunters in their first playthrough. As in all Mega Man games, each robot boss has its own themed stage, with different enemies and a differ...

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is the fourth handheld Zelda game and the only one set in Hyrule. Like the twin Game Boy Color games, Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages , Nintendo outsourced this game's design to Capcom. As with those Oracle games, Capcom nailed it. The central gimmick of Minish Cap is that a magical hat can temporarily shrink Link to a miniscule size. Dotted throughout Hyrule are strange portals at which Link can change size by pressing R. While tiny, Link converses with little people called Minish or Picori, whom only children can see. He can't cross any kind of obstacle, such as roads, raised floors, grass, or shallow water. As a result, shrinking is always limited to a small area; once Link has accomplished whatever he needed to do, he must enlarge himself. Little doors and passages enable puzzles, such as going through a little door to bypass a shut, full-size door, then pressing a button to unlock that door. The Minish Cap is heavy on puzzles (simi...

Demon's Crest, a kind of sequel to Gargoyle's Quest II on the NES, was not a commercial success. According to Nintendo Power, it even recorded negative sales one week due to people returning it! I understand why, despite the fact the game is good: it's too short, especially if you don't search for all the crests. Demon's Crest is cryptic in a way that reminds me of games from the 80's. To beat the game properly, you need to gather the other four pieces of the fire crest, plus five other crests hidden across seven stages. However—and this is where the designers crucially erred—the most common outcome is to prematurely encounter the final boss, Phalanx, after the fourth stage (he mentions how he didn't expect to see Firebrand so soon), beat him, and get the "bad" ending. The credits roll, and you think, wow, my hour of playing wasn't worth $60. Now, a video-game nerd, such as yours truly, might object and say, "Wait! Can't you see that...

F-Zero: GP Legend was added to Switch Online + Expansion Pack this fall, not quite in time for its 20th anniversary. It's the sequel to F-Zero Maximum Velocity , which was essentially a sequel to the original F-Zero . Both Maximum Velocity and GP Legend recreate the 16-bit graphics of the SNES original for the handheld Game Boy Advance. The GBA was a gold mine of a system for fans of the SNES. As in all F-Zero games, you first choose your hovercraft, then engage in single-player racing against computer-controlled racers going at breakneck speeds. At first, you'll probably find yourself bouncing off walls, losing energy, and then exploding, forcing you to restart the race. You get four extra lives before it's Game Over. To avoid this, you don't want to go around the game's many sharp turns at full speed. You should instead tap the gas (A button) rapidly to hit the sweet spot between going too fast or too slow. That was a surprise to me, and I wonder if I should try r...