This is the next game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.

There’s a phenomena about robots you’ve probably heard of before. It’s called the uncanny valley. The idea is the closer a robot looks and acts like a human, the more its inaccuracies are scrutinized and criticized by real humans. The reasons could be myriad — it could be the way it looks or sounds or moves or something else entirely — but the important thing is that it’s not…right. Astria Ascending lives in its own uncanny valley. But it’s not one of being human, rather, it’s one of being a JRPG classic.  

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This is the next game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.

The first big choice you make in Wasteland 3 is selecting your initial two characters. You can pick from a handful of pre-made pairs (according to the guides I read after the fact, you should really go with Yuri and Spence, as they have great exclusive accessories, as well as the first aid ability that comes in very handy in the tutorial missions. You can always replace them later in the game and keep their starting goodies), or you can build your own from scratch. 

When given the option (even when in retrospect, it was the wrong choice), I’m always going to make my own character. I don’t care how much better the standard Commander Shepard character model looks, I’ll take my weird-ass dude any day…even if he accidentally ends up looking like Conrad Vernor. 

I spent a good portion of Mass Effect thinking that the superfan Conrad Vernor character was supposed to look like your Shepard on purpose before realizing my mistake.

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This is the next game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.

Pokemon is a series that is near and dear to me, but since X & Y, it feels like the direction Game Freak has gradually taken the franchise in a direction that diverges from what I want out these games. The move to 3D was inevitable, but it has also made the games clunkier and less vibrant as a result. And while the transition to more open-world gameplay elements has been intriguing, it’s added an aimless quality to exploring the environments that often leaves me cold. 

I know, Pokemon Scarlet. I know…

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This is the next game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.

Both of my parents were educators at my elementary school (they’re retired now.) Mom was a 3rd grade teacher and Dad taught gym. They both would stay after classes were over to work on lesson plans or grade papers or move equipment, and I got to freely choose which one to spend time with before we got to go home. With Dad, I would mostly practice free throws in the gym (though I never got any good at them). But with Mom, I’d often get to play on her computer (when I wasn’t watching Digimon Adventure on her classroom TV.

That was probably my first real experience with computers. I’d play things like Oregon Trail II (the best one, by the way) or an awful typing program called PAWS featuring a freaky Cheshire-Cat-like mascot. But sometimes, I would load up Netscape Navigator and just poke around on the late ‘90s internet. 

I hated this cat so much as a kid.

I only remember bits and pieces of that time online. A Sokoban block-pushing puzzler, a Super Mario Bros. fan game with all-new levels, some first-person hovercraft racer that had multiplayer LAN capabilities (I’ve never been able to find that game since, it’s definitely not Hover! by Microsoft.) a fansite for the Sonic Underground cartoon. Even with my fragmented memory, I remember the joy and adventure I had just digging around. Anything could be around that next corner, and that was half the fun.

Hypnospace Outlaw is the closest I’ve ever come to reliving those formative computer experiences. Set in an alternate 1999, you are thrust into Hypnospace — an internet stand-in that’s part GeoCities and part forum chatroom — and are asked to moderate and police this online Wild West. 

Developer Tendershoot has nailed the tone and aesthetic of this era. The highly compressed bitmap images, the way pages auto-play (incredible) music when they load, the terrible, terrible fonts, the fileshare servers that are completely inscrutable unless you know exactly what you’re looking for — it’s all just perfect. And it’s not just Hypnospace. The game has its own little desktop computer experience complete with email, virtual pets, a download manager and more. It reminds me of Cibele or Her Story, but much more freeform and robust.

But all that is just aesthetic —  the game itself is pretty cool too. As a Hypnospace moderator, you’re given little jobs as you explore the various pages and zones of the browser: Take down some copyrighted material here, censor some threatening speech there, find some lost files that are hanging around…somewhere. Some of these tasks just require you to pay close attention to the pages themselves, while others force you to put on your hacker cap as you cross reference ID codes with unlisted pages, crack passwords or decrypt files, all while a corporate conspiracy bubbles up around you. 

It’s truly satisfying to use your online sleuthing skills to their fullest. And whether you’re stopping a virus from breaking the virtual world or just banning a kid who can’t seem to stop making offensive webcomics, you just feel this sense of power.

In many ways, Hypnospace Outlaw the platonic ideal of the concept of late-90s computing. I do wonder if that hyper-specific aesthetic and mechanics gives it too narrow of an audience, but as someone who is part of that narrow audience, I found my experience with it to be incredibly fun. And it’s one I won’t soon forget.

This is the next game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.

Not every game on the Backlog Roulette wheel is going to be a winner, and they’re not meant to be. Many are games I curiously picked up on a sale or remembered from an old tweet or offhand comment from a friend. 

That was the case with AI: The Somnium Files. Someone described it as a Persona adventure game, and that was good enough for me to snag it on the cheap and hold onto for a rainy day. But it only took a couple of sessions to realize that while The Somnium Files isn’t really what I had in mind.

AI is a detective game at its heart. You embody Special Agent Kaname Date, an acerbic yet disaffected gumshoe with a missing eye. In its socket instead is an AI robot called Aiba who pulls double duty as a sort of Zelda Navi-like character while also giving you a host of super powers (like being able to see through objects or hacking into phone records remotely). But despite having these tools available to you, it only makes the moment to moment gameplay even more of a hunt-and-peck ordeal. 

I just couldn’t get into it, especially once my AI eye turned into a scantily-clad anime waifu for little to no reason. The writing goes into a very creepy and horny mode once this transformation occurs, and that was enough for me. Maybe if the game was more fun to play, I’d have been able to overlook it, but after already being bored and frustrated by the larger mechanics, it ended up as the final straw.

Reeeeeal classy, Date.

So instead of slogging through AI: The Somnium Files any further, I put it down in favor of a different Japanese detective game that also happened to be on the Backlog Roulette wheel. One much more stripped down and straightforward (and much less horny), Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir. 

FDC is a series of two mystery games that (as the name implies) released on Nintendo’s Famicom console. While the 1988 and 1989 originals never saw a release outside of Japan, Nintendo and developer Mages remade the games from the ground up to release worldwide on the Nintendo Switch in 2021. 

What a difference 30+ years can make.

Loading up the first game, The Missing Heir, the interesting mix of new and old hits you immediately. Gone is the pixel art of the 1988 version, replaced by hand-drawn backgrounds and anime-inspired character designs. The chiptune music tracks have all been updated to more modern instrumentation as well. But ever-present is the simple list of actions and dialogue options of the UI.

And it plays like an old adventure game too, requiring you to select some of the same dialogue options multiple times (or in specific, untold sequences) to unlock further options to progress the story. Occasionally, the game will highlight options in yellow to tell you of new options that have just opened up by some trigger, but that is not always the case, nor do these highlighted options always further the plot either. I can appreciate how a detective game should leave the player room to actually make deductions on their own, but oftentimes in The Missing Heir, I would end up cycling through every dialogue choice multiples times, just crossing my fingers I would finally hit upon the right sequence or frequency. Eventually, I would give in and pull up a spoiler-free guide to cut down on the repetition and get through the story.

Because unlike AI: The Somnium Files, Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir actually has a fun story to uncover. Originally being a Famicom game, it’s no Sherlock Holmes, but there are ample rug pulls and intrigue, culminating in a twist you can probably see coming, but maybe not in quite the way you expected. Despite being a game centered around a murder (or two, or three), it’s just kind of a pleasant little experience to work your way through. It’s even got me interested in playing its prequel, The Girl Who Stands Behind.

AI: The Somnium Files may have ended up being a bummer for me (though other people seem to really enjoy it, according to numerous reviews), I’m glad it led me to a game I enjoyed much more. And even better, I was able to trim two games from my backlog this month. That’s value, baby!

This is the next game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.

I always thought Gunpoint was cool. A puzzle-platformer with heavy stealth elements that saw you bounding up buildings with Superman-like leaps and hacking into electronics to sabotage the guards blocking your way, Gunpoint had a great hook. It also had a fun story behind it as the developer, Tom Francis, was a PC Gamer UK editor who built the game in his spare time, having been inspired by the mostly-one-man effort of Derek Yu’s Spelunky.

There was only one small problem with Gunpoint: I didn’t have anything to play it on. Gunpoint, similar to Francis’ equally cool follow-up game Heat Signature (which I have still yet to play) was locked to Windows machines. So I waited for…Jesus, has it really been 10 years? But now that my good friends (and Casual Hour co-hosts) have built me a PC — and the Backlog Roulette wheel deemed it — it was finally time to play a game I’ve been waiting a decade for. 

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This is the next game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.

If you know me at all, you know I love Intelligent Systems. They’re a developer who has made some of my favorite games and franchises of all time — Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Pushmo, WarioWare, Paper Mario, the Super Nintendo port of SimCity, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE. With this many bangers, you start to think they just can’t miss.

But they can miss. And sometimes, they miss hard. 

Shadow president Lincoln is one of the few high points.

Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. is one of those hard misses. On paper, the pitch is compelling: a 3DS turn-based strategy game where you take a steampunky, alt-history crew of folklorish and literature legends led by Abraham Lincoln, and fight off an incoming alien invasion. I mean, that sounds so bombastically dumb and fun. And then you start playing it. 

Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. is not fun to play. It’s closest analog would be something like Valkyria Chronicles (a series I haven’t loved, despite really wanting to), where you navigate levels and make attacks from a third-person, behind-the-back view. It works in Valkyria Chronicles, games you play on a TV or on the luxurious screen of a PlayStation Vita. On the 3DS (even an XL), the cramped conditions make for a frustrating time.

Valkyria Chronicles’ behind the back works just fine when you got the screen real estate to handle it.

Valkyria Chronicles also has the benefit of an overhead map you can pull up any time (y’know, in case you want to do some strategy in your strategy video game). Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. does not, forcing you to memorize a quick fly-through of a level before dumping you in. The game’s director, Paul Patrashcu, says this was to “remove abstraction” and make the game more like a shooter, thinking this would be approachable to players new to strategy games. I don’t know what mapless shooters Paul’s talking about here. Maps are all over shooters, Paul. Put a map in your fucking video game.

But Code Name does bring over one of Valkyria’s worst mechanics fully intact: Enemy overwatch. You see, even though both games are technically turn-based, you are able to move around your characters in pseudo realtime on your turn. Enemies can’t move on your turn, but if you walk into their sight lines, they can and absolutely will shoot at you. And unlike a game like XCOM where overwatch is procc’d once and then it’s over, in Code Name, they’ll just keep doing it until you walk out of their sight, kill them or end your turn. On one hand, it is fair (a number of your fighters have overwatch capabilities too), but it does expose another problem players of Code Name will have to deal with: Weapon ranges…or the lack thereof. 

Seen here: Tom Sawyer about to get overwatched to fucking death.

You see, enemies inherently know their own ranges, so they’ll shoot as soon as you walk within it. But your weapons don’t really have an explicitly-stated range. Instead, as you inch closer to foes, you’ll eventually see their names and health bars pop up. That’s generally when you can start hitting your shots, but you can definitely still miss, especially for guns that shoot multiple shots per attack. There are no indicators for how and when this will happen, just a hidden dice roll that will sometimes bend you over at random. Some weapons, like artillery explosives or pounce attacks do give you a trajectory indicator, but those weapons can’t use overwatch, so they’re more situational in use and can’t be relied upon entirely.

Weapon ranges are too abstract, except the ones for artillery apparently.

But what’s it really matter anyway when you don’t know how effective your shots will be even if they do connect? Sure, you can see an enemy’s health bar, and you can also see how much of a chunk you’ll take out of it will a full hit, but you’re only given a hard number for your damage when you hit, and you’re never given any numbers about the enemies’ health. OK, my Eagle Rifle can do 25 damage per bullet, and yeah, if I squint my eyes at the tiny health bar on the tiny screen, that looks like it might be taking off about 30% of their HP, but we’re dealing with some very fuzzy math here, which leads to more shrugging and guessing than calculating and risking. It’s a system built on almost entirely on feel, which isn’t ideal when your game feels awful. Is basic subtraction also too abstract, Paul?

There are lots of other annoyances as well. Enemy turns take forever (even after the dev patched in a speed up switch after launch), and because you have no tactical map of any kind, you mostly spend enemy turns looking at walls or empty hallways as the game moves patrols around for 10-20 seconds every time. The presentation is grating, with the same voice clip yelling “PLAYER TURN” and “ENEMY TURN” at the beginning of Every. Single. Turn. The character design is fine, I guess. The Silver Age comic look’s big, black outlines do help to make the models pop on the small screen. But also, the first two characters they give you are Henry Fleming (based on the character in The Red Badge of Courage), and the folk hero John Henry. Why they give you two guys both named Henry right off the bat, I have no idea, but it is stupid and confusing when someone yells “Henry,” and I don’t know who they’re talking about, which they do a lot in the beginning of the game. 

Ah yes, swords: The perfect weapon in a shooting game.

Because this game is on the 3DS and is made by Intelligent Systems, it does have some amiibo support. You can scan in four different Fire Emblem amiibo (the four that were out at the time of the game’s development: Marth, Ike, Robin and Lucina) to get their corresponding playable characters in Code Name. For a bunch of sword fighters, they do surprisingly well in fights, but they do have a very odd drawback. If any of the Fire Emblem characters die in a mission, they leave your team completely and can’t come on another mission unless you scan that amiibo again. I can’t decide if that’s a permadeath reference for a core mechanic in Fire Emblem games or if that’s a way to encourage you buy the amiibo rather than just borrowing them from a friend one time to unlock the goodies, but either way, I can tell you it’s very annoying to have to carry around four amiibo on the off chance one of them bites it while you’re out and about. 

I think it’s admirable to try and make a strategy game that is accessible and approachable for people unfamiliar with the genre. But this isn’t it. Mario + Rabbids is that. Marvel Snap is that. Fire Emblem: Awakening and Advance Wars are that. SteamWorld Heist is that (it even has “steam” in the title, making Code Name: S.T.E.A.M somehow even more irrelevant.)

Play SteamWorld Heist instead. It’s so much better!

Look, if you couldn’t tell by now, I think this game is pretty awful in almost every aspect. It’s very funny that Ulysses S. Grant can interact with Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and Tom Sawyer can ask questions about the Necronomicon, but the game all this silly bullshit is attached to is a boring, unintuitive and vague mess. I am baffled how a developer as good at making strategy games as Intelligent Systems is could make something so bad. And I hope I never have to think about it again. 

This is the next game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.

I can’t remember the last time I shouted “oh, fuck off” as often as I did during my last Mutant Year Zero play session. 

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, the 2018 breakout turn-based tactical shooter from Swedish developer The Bearded Ladies Consulting, fools you into thinking you control the battlefield when in reality, the deck is eternally stacked against you. 

If you’ve read or listened to any content from Gamers on the Go before, you’ll know I love this genre. Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Super Robot Wars, XCOM, Into The Breach, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars (a criminally overlooked launch title for the 3DS) — these are the kinds of games where I feel most at home. But being a big fan of a genre can be a double-edged sword, because now I’m pretty particular about what makes a good one of these. 

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars was way better than it had any right to be.

Mutant Year Zero has some cool ideas, but it’s not “a good one of these.” Your ragtag group of mutants — a pig man named Bormin, a duck man named Dux and a…normal lady who sometimes kind of has nature powers named Selma (you do get a couple more recruits over the course of the story) — are Stalkers, a group of capable hunters and scavengers keeping humanity’s last bastion of hope, the Ark, from the brink of collapse. Complicating this are Ghouls, who roam the post-apocalyptic Zone outside of the Ark, looking to bring the whole thing down. And you need to use your cunning and strategy to stop them while also finding Eden, a place that may be a salvation for the ruined world. 

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This is the fourth game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.

You want to hear something super lame? Echochrome is all about your perspective. 

OK, maybe I should explain why that’s lame. Echochrome is literally a game about perspective. You rotate a camera to hide, reveal or alter the level’s geometry to coax a character you don’t directly control to navigate to specific areas of the map. It’s Lemmings in the style of an M.C. Escher. 

So when I say it’s a game about your perspective, that’s some on-the-nose, too-clever-for-your-own-good writer bullshit. Except that that’s not what I’m talking about. 

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This is the third game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.

Video games can be anything — from a complex web of interactions in something like Crusader Kings, to the twitchy, fast-paced action of a Call of Duty, even to the chill vibes of A Little To The Left — but should they be? Can you think of a time when you were playing a game and thought “this might be better as a movie/book/comic/TV show?” Because that’s kind of where I am on Opus: Echo of Starsong.

Opus is billed as a text-driven side-scrolling adventure game, which, while technically true, seems a bit generous. Outside of its quite pleasing aesthetic elements (interesting characters, a well-realized world, striking visuals and sound design), the rest of the game feels…kind of like an afterthought. 

You can freely move your ship around space, but moving to a destination requires an amount of fuel equivalent to where you were last stationed.

In Opus, you travel around a solar system in a spaceship, talk to people and explore asteroids as you look for increasingly rare caves of lumen (the game’s energy source, basis for religion and handwaving catchall to explain literally anything). But all of these activities feel not just unfun, but so powerfully straightforward as to be mere busy work before the next story beat can be told. 

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The final part in GOTG’s GB & GBC Top 25 coverage, make sure you check out my good friend Giggy’s list, as well as the shared list we made together on the most recent episode of the podcast.

While the NES was my very first brush with video games, it wasn’t until the Game Boy that I truly fell in love with gaming. For a kid who got taken on a lot of long car trips, it was a godsend (both to me, but probably even more so to my parents, who could drive in relative peace). I dumped hundreds of hours into many of these games, and some of them continue to rank within my all-time favorites. 

25. Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3

24. Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble

23. Pokemon Pinball

22. Tiny Toons Adventures: Babs’ Big Break

21. Metal Gear Solid (Ghost Babel)

20. Shantae

19. Harvest Moon 3 GBC

18. Balloon Kid

17. Mario’s Picross

16. Mole Mania

15. Mega Man V

14. Super Mario Land

13. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

12. The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages

11. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX

10. Mario Tennis

I’m not usually a big sports game guy. I find the ways devs abstract a sport through mechanics interesting, but often, their efforts fall short. I’d prefer to just hitting the batting cages than play Game Boy Baseball, y’know? But that’s not the case with Mario Tennis. Camelot aced this one, with simple, responsive controls that offered hidden depth in its strategic play. And the light RPG elements let you shape your character to better fit your play style (then import that character into the N64 incarnation!)

9. Warlocked

I didn’t grow up with a PC, so the real-time strategy genre was always something of a mystery to me. Warlocked was the first RTS I ever got my hands on, and while I can’t say it’s a particularly glowing example of the genre, the fact it even works on a Game Boy Color is astonishing to me. I ran the wheels off this game, playing through both its campaigns and collecting all the colorful wizard characters (Sweatwiz for life!) 

8. The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons

Zelda continues to not be my thing, but the Oracle games are generally my favorites of the entire franchise (which feels wrong since they’re made by Capcom). Of the pair, I prefer Seasons’ mechanics. Plus, I really love exploring Subrosia — a volcanic land sitting right below the overworld — and interacting with its Jawa-looking residents. Most people are going to prefer Link’s Awakening, and that’s fine, but for my money, Oracle of Season is the way to go.

7. Donkey Kong ’94

It’s unfair how good this game is. The movement tech Mario can achieve is unreal, and it forever changed the way we think about Mario’s moveset. If you’ve ever enjoyed the triple jumps of Super Mario 64 or the cap throwing and diving of Mario Odyssey, you have DK ’94 to thank for inspiring it all. This game takes the original arcade game, and expands it into one of the greatest puzzle-platformers of all time. 

6. Tetris

It’s Tetris. I mean, what else needs to be said? Later versions have added slight tweaks to the formula in the form of T-spins or holding pieces that make them arguably better, but whenever I want to play some Tetris, this is always the one I reach for. 

5. Kirby’s Dream Land 2

Creator Masahiro Sakurai has said the original Kirby’s Dream Land is all about introducing people to what a platform game is. Dream Land 2, in my opinion, is about introducing you to what they can be. The copy abilities brought in from Kirby’s Adventure are expanded threefold with the addition of Kirby’s animal companions, and the music from the battle with King Dedede still bangs. This will forever be my favorite Kirby game.

4. Mario Golf

I gushed about Mario Tennis above, but it can feel repetitive at times as you play set after set on nearly-identical courts. Mario Golf brings in everything good about Tennis (the RPG elements, character importing, great controls) and applies it to a sport that naturally has a little more variety through its courses, challenging you to approach them in different ways. Pick up both if you can, but if you only have room for one, Golf is the way to go. 

3. Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal

The second generation of Pokemon games add so much to the series, both from a mechanical perspective with new types, held items, additional HM moves, breeding and more. But maybe more importantly, Gold, Silver and Crystal surprise and delight in a way that make you feel like you’re in a living and breathing world. It can be annoying for those going back to the games now, but having a real-time day and night cycle affecting the Pokemon you could catch felt revolutionary. And weekly events like the bug-catching contest or a Lapras that only appeared on certain days made you want to explore (and re-explore) every area in the game. Last, but certainly not least, going back to Kanto in the postgame continues to be one of the coolest surprises a game can throw at you.

2. Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow

…But even if all of the above is true, it’s not the original. Red, Blue and Yellow, while often a broken, buggy mess, got so much right on their first try. I think a lot of it is the sense of ownership I got through playing. When you pick up a Mario or a Zelda game, you’re playing as those characters, escaping into their shoes. With Pokemon, those were my shoes, and the creatures beside me were ones I raised and trained. It was all my adventure. And that made it all the more special. 

1. Pokemon Trading Card Game

There’s something about card games though. All my Pokemon card friends just wanted to collect them, to keep them in binders and show them off. I always wanted to play the actual game, but would never have anyone to play against. That is, until this came out. Now I had a bevy of computer opponents to face off with, and every win would grant me the dopamine rush of ripping open virtual card packs to further enhance my decks. Even if the card game its based on is a little unbalanced, it’s still one of my favorite games ever, and my favorite Game Boy title of all-time.

Ed. note: Thanks to “Giggysan” for joining on GOTG’s GB & GBC Top 25 episode. The following list are his personal top games for the system, which include none of the restrictions we used in our shared list.

25. Boxxle

24. Shadowgate Classic

23. Balloon Kid

22. DuckTales

21. Super Mario Land

20. Shantae

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On the off chance you don’t have 2.5 hours to listen to a podcast where Chase Koeneke and Matt “Giggysan” Giguere debate and deliberate over our shared GOTG list of the best Game Boy and Game Boy Color games of all time, here’s the ordered list of 25 we came up with.

Same criteria we used in previous lists:

• One game per series (only one Super Mario Land
• No ports (so something like Dragon Warrior III didn’t count)
• Total remakes were allowed (is DK'94 a remake? Who knows?)
• Only official North American releases

Look for Chase and Matt’s personal lists later this week.

25. The Game Boy Camera

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Subscribe to the show and listen here.

Chase and Matt “Giggysan” Giguere have one final era of Nintendo handheld consoles to rank, and it’s the ones that started it all. Listen in as we run through our favorites and build our list of the best 25 games you can play on these portables.

Same rules as before: Straight ports are frowned upon (sorry Dragon Warrior III), only one game per series and only official US releases were considered. We’ll post the list of 25 later this week, then be on the lookout for personal top 25 lists from both Chase and Giggy.

This is the second game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.

I’m trying to remember the last time I felt genuine emotion for a character in a video game. Fire Emblem comes to mind. It is my favorite franchise after all. The idea of building up a roster of characters from zeroes to heroes. I celebrate their wins. I’m pained by their losses. But they don’t feel real. When one goes down, I mourn the loss of their utility more than I do the loss of their character.

ALT

I may not feel genuine emotion for Lapis as a character, but I sure do love when she does this.

Pokemon has a similar issue. I watch these monsters grow up and evolve over the course of my journey, my six faithful companions helping me take on the world. But the artifice never fully falls away. I see their “health points” and their mechanical abilities and am reminded these are still just bundles of data, and if I think about the numbers long enough, I can game them just right to always land in my favor. The closest I’ve felt to a critter in Pokemon is in the most recent entries, where Game Freak added in a chance to “hang on” with 1HP left after a devastating enemy move if your Pokemon’s friendship stat was high enough. It’s cool to see a Pokemon break the rules of the game through the power of love, but it also happens too often and too randomly for it to feel authentic.

Cliche as it might be, that last time that genuine feeling occurred might be Team Ico’s previous game, Shadow of the Colossus. Agro, your character’s horse was a constant and stalwart ally. Yes, it was mechanical in its own way, but in a game built around solitude, having this one thing on your side was a comfort, one that made the mostly empty world a little less lonely. And while Shadow of the Colossus plays on this attachment in a few key moments, Team Ico’s third game, The Last Guardian, is built entirely in service of this interaction. 

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