Top 5 games of 1990

I’ve been a gamer for most of my life, having lived through the third generation of gaming (NES) upwards. Over the next 25 weeks, I will list my top 5 games from 1990 – 2015. To ensure consistency, here are the rules I will be following

• I will only write about games I’ve played
• Even though I played most of these games a few years after they released, I will stick with the year they were released (otherwise this list will be all over the place)
• Some games may have been released at different times for different regions. When this happens, I will use the year related to the version I’ve played
• Due to the second rule, it does mean I won’t be able to list gems like Super Mario Brothers and Circus Charlie

This week I will highlight 1990

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Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers (NES/ Golden China)

As a thirty-something year-old man, I tend to be a little jaded when it comes to licenced games, but as an eight-year old kid hooked on Disney cartoons during M-Net’s Sunday evening open time slot, I couldn’t get enough of it. Chip ‘n’ Dale was a fun platformer, improved by the option to play two-player (loved chucking Dale onto enemies). I never actually owned a NES, and did most of my gaming on a Golden China (had no idea I was playing pirated software), so with no option to save my progress, it actually worked in my favour that the game could be finished in a single sitting.

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Super Mario Bros 3 (NES/ Golden China)

You’re going to be seeing a LOT of Super Mario games in my lists. Arguably one of the greatest games ever made (having just been chosen as number 1 in IGN’s Greatest Games of all-time list), Super Mario Bros 3 was and still is an absolute joy to play. I recently booted it up for my nephew to play and within ten minutes I wrangled the controller from him and took over. A timeless game that every gamer should play.

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Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (Sega Mega Drive)

I never actually owned an original Mega Drive. I got a knock-off at a flea-market along with an 8-in-1 cartridge that had Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage, Flintstones, Columns, Mickey Mouse and a few more games. I did not know it was a knock-off at a time (8-in-1’s made sense compared to the previous 64-in-1’s I had in my previous knock-off). Like Chip ‘n’ Dale above, this was another Disney platformer I was really into in my youth. The game sees Mickey save Minnie from a witch named Mizrabel (ten points for name) who wanted to steal her youth (a theme we will see a few years later in a famous Rare game). The game was a mix of the first two Super Mario games, in that your attacks alternated between jumping on your enemies heads (like the first SMB) or throwing apples (like the second SMB).

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Snow Bros: Nick and Tom (Arcade)

The second co-op title in my list, Snow Bros was a spiritual successor to Bubble Bobble, and continued in its storied, manic tradition of encasing enemies and then killing them. I never thought I was actually killing them before I sat to type this piece. Games are simplistic like that, like old action movies. The game follows the exploits of these murderous siblings on their quest to save their girlfriends (I’m not sure if they were also siblings). These icy damsels happen to be princesses, and the bros happen to wear overalls. Coincidence? I replayed Snow Bros about six years ago, and it remains just as fun.

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Columns (Sega Mega Drive)

Confession time, I actually prefer columns to Tetris. This might seem blasphemous but some of my fondest memories of playing video games as a kid was playing columns while my granddad sat on the couch next to me, probably judging me for not using investing my time in better pursuits, like rubbing his feet or playing Carrom (check it out). For all the millenials reading this, Columns is the spiritual ancestor of bejeweled, or candy crush, without the annoying social media sharing.

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So these are my top five games that were released in 1990. Join me next Monday as I go through my favourite games from 1991. Leave a comment and let me know which were your favourite games from the past, and if you can guess the Rare game I referenced earlier.

Video Game Review: Mario Party 10

Professional wrestling is often predicated on the notion that there’s a fan-favourite to cheer and a villain to boo. This age-old narrative is evident in all popular media, including video games; for every Ryu, there’s an M.Bison, for every Warden a broodmother and of course, for every Mario a Bowser.

It’s-a him, Bowser!

This animosity is usually so apparent that both sides don’t even share a locker room.

This is what makes the Mario games so perplexing: that Peach constantly gets kidnapped by Bowser, and then joins him for a four-ball, tennis match and a race at Mario Circuit (which is basically Zwartkop raceway with fewer questionable mushrooms).

Mario Party 10 at its core is a series of mini-games held together by a four-player virtual board game experience across a variety of Super Mario World locations. Each game requires four players, but not to worry, should you not have a full human team, the game supplies AI players.

Gold Reef City. We see you.

In Mario Party 10, there are three modes to play: Mario Party, Bowser Party (a new mode which added an interesting spin on the old mechanic) and amiibo Party, which incorporates Nintendo’s character figures.

There are five boards in total this time around, so initially I felt a little cheated as the predecessor had seven. But a bigger issue emerged after two playthroughs: none of the stages were particularly memorable. There were different bosses, and small structural changes, but everything seemed like a chore, with the boss being nothing more than a delay to the end.

Eighteen hours in and I don’t have a favourite, compared to Super Mario World where I loved any level that kept me above water and away from those dreadful fish.

Watch out for the beep beep Cheep-cheeps!

I owned a copy of the original Mario Party back when people danced awkwardly to Eiffel 65’s Blue and no one really knew what the Matrix was about. Sixteen years on and not much has changed in those respects, but the world has moved on in other ways and Mario Party 10 – for all its charm and nostalgia – remains a relic of a time passed.

An area where the game suffers is that the game boards take, on average, half an hour to complete.

The original Mario Party never had to compete for attention against a huge selection of instant message services, social media networks and video-on-demand content providers. Half an hour might not seem like a long period of time, especially for those who emerge from Call of Duty sessions after days, hiding from sunlight like unsparkly vampires, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a challenge. Perhaps this is due to the long loading times, the scarcity of actual mini-games and the inability to skip or speed up the computer’s turn.

In this way, Mario Party is a lot like riding the Cobra at Gold Reef City – lots of waiting around before a small jolt of fun. It didn’t help knowing that a vast majority of the game relied on luck, and I often felt frustrated with the balancing or rather, the lack thereof. And annoyingly, it’s very similar to Mario Kart in that the computer will just catch up towards the end to add some stress in a “weird fixed game show” sort of way.

Hope you packed some Peaceful Sleep.

One of the bigger challenges I faced was that the game requires a Wii-mote in order to play.

Long ago I gifted my Wii to undeserving niblings, leaving me with only one Wii-mote. I found this to be problematic, but also rather indicative of the machine’s shortcomings as it can’t seem to shake off its Wii legacy. This is perhaps a reason why the Wii U failed to take off; I’m sure lots of people still buy Wii U games and try playing them on their Wiis.

Perhaps I’m biased because the original N64 had four controller ports, and lent itself to local four-player split-screen action. I guess it’s a sign of the times that online play has eroded this previously-popular method of gaming.

Feed me Mario… and Peach… and Luigi… and Wario.

Mario Party 10 does continue a long tradition of first-party games on Nintendo’s Wii U console, in that the graphics are amazing. They have a sheen to them that rivals Super Mario 3D Land and Super Smash Bros for the Wii U. The game really is a pleasure to behold, it’s just not a lot of fun to play.

I’m a huge Nintendo fan, but I can’t help but feel underwhelmed at this offering. Forgettable mini-games, poor pacing and no real memorable moments make Mario Party 10 the Hulk Hogan in a John Cena world, holding on to something past and being unable to evolve.

This review originally appeared in HTXT.co.za