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"Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3" - Nintendo Gamecube

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Ah, Tony Hawk, the man who was once a skating legend and is now living an eternal life of people mistaking him for a guy who looks like or has the name of Tony Hawk but is not Tony Hawk. And also, ah, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater,  the famous PS1 hit that introduced lots of kids to their favorite college rock. And maybe, Tony Hawk. Anyway, so this is the third one of those. Up to this point, they were developed by Neversoft, the company you may know as the one with that weird slithering eyeball logo. That's how I remember them, anyway. They mostly are known for developing the Tony Hawk  games, but they also developed Spider-Man  (a PS1 favorite of mine), and more recently, developed Call of Duty: Ghosts  before being merged with Infinity Ward and then being made defunct. Apparently Pro Skater 3  shares the title with Grand Theft Auto III  for highest rated PS2 game of all time on Metacritic, and the magazine "Next Generation" ranked as the 14th-highest selling PS2 ga
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"Pooyan" - NES/Famicom

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Pooyan  was released by Konami in 1982 for arcade. In our journey's timeline, it's now 1985, so it's been a little while, and it turns out that three years later was just the year that Hudson Soft decided was the time to bring Pooyan  to the people at home. There's honestly shamefully little I know to say about Pooyan  in this intro. The game was apparently popular enough to warrant a whole host of ports to different systems throughout the years, as there are over 10 versions (!). A fun little factoid is that Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker apparently contains a series of missions called "The Pooyan Missions," which feature music and sound effects from this game as Big Boss shoots down balloons carrying off soldiers. The game was also designed by a fella named Tokuro Fujiwara, apparently sometimes credited as Professor F, which is awesome. He later joined Capcom and helped design some big games like Ghosts 'n' Goblins , and several of the Mega Ma
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"No Ri Ko" - Turbografx-16/PC Engine CD

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Alright, here's the one that gets my blog put on some kind of list. I'm not sure where to start with this so let's start here: Ogawa Noriko was the stage name of a J-Pop idol in the '80s, and actress up until recently as far as I understand. She debuted as a J-Pop artist in 1987, with a song called 'Namida wo Tabanete'   (涙をたばねて, which I'll tentatively translate as 'Put Away Your Tears' or maybe 'Bundle Up Your Tears') included here for the curious (I actually kinda like it). In 1988, I guess NEC was looking for someone to feature in one of the first CD games ever made ( Fighting Street  being the other) and with the help of developer  Alfa System,  this Noriko themed game was born. The two games released alongside the PC Engine CD peripheral. Supposedly, the game features recordings of voice and video of Noriko herself, which also supposedly (according to the Japanese Wikipedia) makes her the first person in the entire world to ever
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"Super Mario Bros." - NES/Famicom

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Well, boys and girls, we actually made it here. It's taken awhile but we've arrived, and the NES library can only get better from here on out (and also worse, in many ways). That's right, time for Super Mario Bros.,  the loving spiritual sequel (or maybe just regular sequel) to Mario Bros.  This'n' is the one that basically put Nintendo on the map, or at least secured their spot on the map. In late 1985, the Famicom Disk System was well underway and rapidly approaching, and masterminds Shigeru Miyamoto (heard of him?) and Takashi Tezuka knew they needed to do something special to mark the end of the life of the cartridge, since it would soon be replaced by the disk. Summoning up all their design prowess, they decided to make this: Super Mario Bros.  They got Koji Kondo, the now legendary composer, to do the now legendary soundtrack, and now you and your grandparents all know the game and can hum the main theme by heart if you think about it for a second. Supe
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"Star Wars Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron II" - Gamecube

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I didn't own this, but I owned Rogue Squadron III  growing up (they're very similar). I'm pretty sure I picked it up out of a GameStop bargain bin for $5 and took it home, played it for one afternoon and decided it was too hard and shelved it for the next decade. Sometime in high-school though, in an effort to beat some of the games I had shelved over the years, I remember taking it down and playing through it, but to be honest I don't remember much about it. Rogue Squadron II , as you might have guessed, is the sequel to another game called-- again, as you might have guessed, Rogue Squadron , that came out on PC and the N64. They were both co-developed by LucasArts and a company called Factor 5. You know the former most likely (they basically just make Star Wars games now, but once upon a time they made point and click adventures like Grim Fandango , and Monkey Island ), but the latter are more obscure. They're the developers for the Turrican  series on SNES a
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"Fighting Street" - Turbografx/PC Engine CD

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It's our first Turbografx CD! And it's Fighting Street! What, you don't know Fighting Street? What if I rearrange it to Street Fight... er? That's right, this is Street Fighter! The original! You haven't played it, I haven't played it, all we know about it is that it had big slappy buttons in the arcade, and we're in for a night. The game was developed originally in 1987 exclusively for arcade by Capcom but is ported here by Alfa System . This was the game that standardized the concept of the 6-button control, and served as one of the first major outings into what became the modern fighting game genre. I've often heard that Street Fighter's first outing was a beat 'em up, and I guess we'll see, but Wikipedia says that it's actually a competitive fighting game that takes place over rounds. Since the PC Engine controller only had two buttons, the home version of the game did away with the 6-button controls and replaced them with
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