Super Punch-Out!!

Knnnnockout!

Boxing has never really interested me. Maybe it's because it's just not as real as Professional Wrestling, I don't know. Boxing video games, therefore, are also low on the list of games I want to play, but there are a couple of them on this 1001 list and they're on it for a reason.

Nintendo's Super Punch-Out!! seems to be the gold standard for both simplicity and challenge. It won't take much to know that button mashing won't work here, but it will take some practice to make progress on your way through the circuits.

Let's glove up (if that's a thing) and fist someone.

Punch them.

Definitely punch them.

Sub-Terrania

Summary: Destroy THE THING

To say that if you've seen one gravity and thrust physics type of game, you've seen them all is to have not seen the many ways developers can think of making that concept even harder.

If it's not fine tuning the physics, it's sticking players inside narrow caves that require great precision, lest they get blown up by the walls. If it's not giving them shields to cope with the tight spaces, it's then adding in enemies that need to be shot before they shoot you.

But that's not enough for Sub-Terrania, as it adds a bit of a plot, rescue missions, refuelling, and even some physics puzzles into the mix. All of that while you delicately balance your inputs, because a single mistake can be costly.

Sounds like I won't get through an awful lot of this game...

Uniracers

Go, Uniracer, go!

"We need a racing game."
"Yeah!"
"Like, a fast racing game."
"Definitely!"
"And it'll be based on anthropomorphic unicycles speeding along floating tubes."
"Yeee...uhh... Sorry, what?"

And that's how Uniracers was born. Probably. I wasn't there, I don't know.

What can be said about a game where you race unicycles along floating tracks, pulling off tricks to get necessary boosts of speed?

Samurai Shodown II

How weak you are! I might kill you as well as "tofu" with my sword!

Source // Neo-Geo.com

It's 'showdown', right? With a 'w'? I'm not the only one to always type it correctly before realising that, no, Samurai Shodown II drops the 'w' because... reasons.

True to it's misspelt name, though, there are Samurai's on show here, and they are down to fight. It's like Street Fighter with weapons, and that can't be too shabby, can it?

Sensible World of Soccer

You're a goal-scoring superstar hero.

Eleven vs eleven. Put the ball in the other teams net. Football is simple, isn't it? But with that simplicity, you can commit an entire lifetime to perfecting a single element of the game - to become the best attacker, defender, goalkeeper, manager or to get the most out of coaching or captaining. It's a game that requires luck and skill, strategies and risks, and even an understanding of science and data-driven approaches to problems.

Football, the beautiful game, simply has to have video games that capture enough of all that complexity and yet are still as easy to grasp as the concept of two teams kicking a ball around a park. These days the two giants in the genre are FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer, but before those series' were yearly entries that captivated millions of gamers all over the world, there was another series by the name of Sensible Soccer.

After a few years of simple soccer titles, Sensible World of Soccer was released, bringing more detail than I bet you could imagine. It's 1994, and you're about to load up a football game with around 27,000 players from 1,500 teams. And it's not a FIFA game...

Let's blow the whistle for the kick off.

Puzzle Bobble

Where, for some reason, we all Bust a Move.

Ahh, Puzzle Bobble. I don't think I've ever played you. Played plenty of 'homages' to you, a fair few rip-offs, and probably a few adult-themed variations of you, but I don't think I've ever played the original Puzzle Bobble.

Not that there's much difference in any of these games, though, bar the skin slapped on top of them, the sound effects coming out of them and the degree to which the developers have gone power-up mad - thankfully not the case with the original arcade game.

Let's just chill and pop some bubbles, shall we?

Point Blank

Quota Complete

Doctors Don and Dan seem awfully familiar, but I can't for the life of me place them anywhere in my memory.

I owned a GunCon for the PlayStation and definitely used it for playing some of the Die Hard game, but that can't have been all I got that peripheral for. Did I get it for Time Crisis? Doesn't ring any bells. Did I get it for Point Blank? Again, I'm just not sure I ever owned that.

As you might have worked out by now, Point Blank is a light gun game that made its way from the arcades to the PlayStation and onto the Nintendo DS, and the very astute readers out there will note that I owned a GunCon. Past tense. We're not going to be shooting any television screens this time around - if I've even played this before in the first place.

'You don't need to be serious to be a success' appears to be the mantra for this games development, so let's shoot all kinds of things against the clock for no real reason at all.

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?

Gravity Power

Feel the power! It's a new game, yes it is!

Not appearing... the players. Source // Lysator.liu.se

Asteroids, Thrust, Lunar Lander... remember them? Of course you do. Games where the difference between gracefully flying through a canyon and splatting into the side of it is the well-controlled use of the thrust button.

These games are both fun and infuriating, as mastering them often requires plenty of practice and some knowledge of physics is an added bonus. But, what would happen if you were to split the screen down the middle and let friend battle friend?

Gravity Power would happen.

Little Big Adventure

No Fun Zone. Dr FunFrock's orders.

Not for the first time in this endeavour of mine have I had absolutely no idea what a game was before playing it, but that's getting increasingly unlikely these days. For the moment, though, games of the past can still surprise me, and Little Big Adventure surprised me.

It's 1994 and from the overactive imagination of the French comes a story - an adventure, if you will - of a lowly hero escaping from a police state to save his planet.

Isometric 2D backgrounds, animated 3D character models interacting above it, and a somewhat freeform environment that allows players to explore on their own, as much as follow any set path. It has enough to at least warrant an "Ok then, let's see what this is all about", so it's time to see what this is all about.