Next up was top PC game Populous, a creation simulator (specifically referred to as a "God game") that I know I just scratched the surface of, even after playing for a little while and watching a playthrough video as well.
At first I was thinking I wouldn't get to play it at all because it's not the most intuitive game. I clicked and I clicked, but I couldn't make anything happen. I selected a tutorial from the menu to get some direction, and found even that didn't help. It's the kind of game that will take more time than I have right now to really get into. To even load the game you had to answer a question with information from the game manual (thanks, Internet Archive).
I did manage to start some kind of skirmish with the evil red population, and though it was looking good at first and I was turning their huts' flags to blue, at length I started losing battles and I just know that big skull on my leader's former house is a bad sign.
I'll add this to my list of things that have piqued my interest, but all I can give it is a surface run for now.
1989 sees Nintendo shift from Game & Watch technology to the Game Boy, which arrived in my house on Christmas morning as a complete surprise. I still have a Game Boy Pocket, but I don't have the Tetris cartridge anymore so it was back to the Switch Online library to play a round of the top-selling handheld game of 89. These sales were bolstered by bundling it with the device, but it's not like Tetris is some throw-in game. It's Tetris, after all.
This specific version of Tetris on the Game Boy is the one I'm best at, not surprisingly given the time I'd put into it. I was kind of a jerk one year and brought the game into my staff room (this was on the Super Game Boy adapter) and left it there for people to keep setting high scores, then I'd beat their record by a slim margin, wait for someone to top that, then keep repeating the process.
I always went by lines and not score and I remember 221 lines being my best score. I missed taking a screenshot above to catch the number; I was distracted by the rocket launch that accompanies certain score levels and didn't think to rewind to it until it was too late. I was happy with this pick up and play score.
Speaking of bundled game sales; I found confirmation of what I suspected: the original Super Mario Bros. was still listed as the top-selling game because it was bundled with the NES system, but Super Mario Bros. 2 was the best-selling standalone game
Now, I got into a bit of trouble with Super Mario Bros. 2 because I was renting the game from a local variety store and playing it throughout the week when I still had homework to do. I believe I lost my Nintendo privileges for a couple of weeks after that.
I loved and still love the gameplay. I know a lot of people get worked up about the fact that this featured Mario characters and elements inserted into an already designed and unrelated game, but I thought it was great that there was this whole new gameplay dynamic, worlds, and characters. The freedom to explore parts of the world expanded upon what the first game allowed by opening up different paths to take, riding floating eggs to new areas, and dipping in and out of alternate realities to collect items.
For this week, I played through beating the first few Birdos (and that bomb-tossing mouse shown up above), taking turns as the four characters, before jumping into a restore point at the end of the game and defeating Wart as Peach - sorry, Princess Toadstool. She was always my number one pick of a character, as evidenced by the summary of character choice at the end of the game:
It actually took me a long time to officially beat this game because, back when I was shirking homework to play it, I had beaten Wart but at the same time fallen prey to one of his attacks. So there was Wart, defeated, but I was too and tie goes to the villain, I guess. Eventually I worked up the nerve to try again and sealed the deal.
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