Monster Max

It was a graveyard smash.

I don't have the best of times with these isometric titles, like Knight Lore and, here, Monster Max, but it's been a while since we've seen one, and this one is on the Game Boy, of all things. I've never heard of it, naturally, so we'll dive right in and see how far we get.

Music has been banned and our titular protagonist is a guitarist, so you can already see the conflict that will play out in this game, but how will we go about being able to play some tunes once more?

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

Wow! This looks pretty heavy!

Zelda on the Game Boy, you say? That should probably be pretty good, shouldn't it? Cramming an entire adventure into a Game Boy cartridge shouldn't be too big an ask, but there's bound to be some expectations thanks to a certain Link to the Past...

Enough beating around the bush, let's slash the sword with our name on it through all the vegetation in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. Is it a spin-off? A side story? Alternate universe? Inspired by? I don't know, but it is different.

Tetris

So you got this for the Game Boy, too, right?

Mistakes were made...

Where were you when you first played Tetris? I can't remember, but I know for certain that it was on my Game Boy and it was on my Game Boy an awful lot. If ever I got bored or frustrated with Super Mario Land, in went Tetris - so long as the batteries still had juice.

Tetris is everywhere, you can't have not played it, so we'll keep this post short and sweet so that we can all get back to playing. Ready?

Marble Madnesss

Let's all lose our marbles!

Source // Wikipedia

I don't ever recall playing Marble Madness, but I get the feeling I might have. Maybe I'm confusing it for playing an actual marble maze game made of wood and marbles, I don't know. What I do know though is that I know of it. That was a mouthful, but then again it is hard to bargle nawdle zouss with all these marbles in my mouth.

Jesus, what's become of me? Get back in the game.

Boulder Dash

He did the dash, he did the Boulder Dash. The Boulder Dash, it was a home console smash...

Source // Moby Games

Finally, a title I recognise. A game I've played, somewhere, in some form. Where, how, when, I've no idea, but Boulder Dash has a place in my memory and a very obvious place on this list, where it is the third, or fourth, maybe twelfth game we've seen so far to be about mining.

Seriously, games industry, did everything revolving around digging back in the early 80s? Has there been an asteroid mining simulator that I've missed, just to get a piece of that sweet space setting that sells so well too?

I ought to try out Game Dev Tycoon sometime and see if it's just me complaining, or if these guys knew what they were talking about. Until then, I'm firing up Boulder Dash.

Frogger

Hop along, son. You've seen it all before.

Source // Wikipedia

Where oh where was I when I first encountered Frogger? I couldn't tell you, but my memory wants to say that it was a nice family friendly game, so I wouldn't be surprised if I was rather young when I was first squashed by oncoming traffic. Maybe it was available at school. We played Lemmings at school, so we might have played Frogger.

Anyway, bumbling through my memory aside, Frogger is impossible to forget, if only because everything else like it is referred to as 'like Frogger', that game where you hop a frog across a dangerously designed road network before hopping across a congested river. Only then can you feel safe, until another frog spawns (hah, frogspawn, get it?) and the cycle repeats.

It repeats so often that Frogger is everywhere, so once more I've hopped into a few different versions to see what's what (and once more, it still has absolutely nothing to do with my inability to play the original arcade version...).

Ms. Pac-Man

The only hall of fame she'll be inducted in is the alcohol of fame on the wall of shame...

Source // Wikipedia

Back in the day, I thought Ms. Pac-Man was little more than a reskin of Pac-Man. The cynical side of me would be shouting 'Cash grab! Cash grab!' but nowadays, the more learned figure that I hope I am knows how wrong such statements are.

Ms. Pac-Man has a murky past. Perhaps not murky, but not as simple as you might imagine, starting life as another game before being shown to Midway, who were impatiently waiting for an official sequel to Pac-Man from Namco... in the rush to get something out into the public, anything of merit would do. This game would indeed do.

Donkey Kong

Characters in video games? You're having a laugh.

I'm faaairly certain that the first time I encountered Donkey Kong was on my Game Boy, way back when. It was simple, it moved smoothly, it didn't make too much sense and you were often caught out by physics-defying barrels thrown by an angry gorilla, but it was fun. It held my attention for a while, not that I ever completed it.