Tokyo Crash Mobs

Tokyo Crash Mobs is the kind of game that’s emblematic of Nintendo’s digital download services. It’s a small, bizarre, yet charming experiment that you rarely find elsewhere nowadays, especially from a company as safe as Nintendo is. It clearly wasn’t a high budget production and it suffers from steep difficulty and unreliable controls, but it’s the kind of game that ends up being greater than the sum of its parts. I was honestly kind of fed up with its gameplay even before the end and that bug I kept encountering only made things worse, but because of how it all comes together, I find that it remains steadfast in my memory.

Challenger

Challenger is yet another game to add to the pile of "misunderstood NES games that are actually good but people think are bad because they played them years past their ideal historical contexts" alongside games like Hydlide, Deadly Towers, The Legend of Kage, and Xevious. People playing it for the first time nowadays could easily walk away unimpressed thinking it's just a worse Zelda with some other stuff, but when looked at in the context of 1985, it comes off as something really ahead of the curve. With multiple genres of play, a large world that takes exploration and practice to master, and a flexible difficulty curve for all kinds of players, it's a game that impressed me in short order.