It's Street Fighter on top once again in the arcade - this time it's version "II X" - and it provides enough incremental improvements to bring fans back with their quarters (this coming from a guy who owns most of the WWE 2K games from 14-24, some of which offered very little by way of change).
I took a run as T-Hawk and made it to ... three wins! I'm starting to think that the CPU gives you an easy enough ride for the first three to make you feel pretty good about yourself.
My streak was stopped by Honda who, as reported before, is one of my favourite characters to use, so I consider that to be a betrayal on par with Fredo's from Godfather II. You can play it here.
I missed out on Donkey Kong Country back when it was the top-selling game on the Super Nintendo system in '94, but I've read about its history before and think it's an interesting story. This game featured the last great graphic advancement for this generation, to the point that when some higher-up at Nintendo saw game footage, they presumed that it was an early look at something for the upcoming Nintendo 64 because it was such a leap in design.
I've played it a couple of times before through Switch Online (which is how I played it this time) and, as much as I appreciate the game's innovations, the game doesn't do much for me. I find it too much like the Sonic games, which weren't up my alley to begin with.
Still, I love how it re-positioned Donkey Kong as a hero, freeing him from the trappings of a Pauline-kidnapping, barrel-throwing villain.
Doom II also offered very few new features on top of the original game; it's a classic, nuts and bolts sequel in the way that it simply offers more of what was already great. In that way it follows the Super Mario Bros. "Lost Levels" model of expanding, but not evolving the world.
What Doom II did bring was a more accessible online multiplayer mode, although, to be clear, "online" meant that I lugged my desktop over to my friend's house and we connected the CPUs together. It was still really exciting.
I've played Doom on the Xbox quite a bit over the years, but it's been ages since I revisited Doom II. For this project, I didn't want to play with the console controller, so I found a site that let me play quickly with my favourite set up: keyboard arrows to move, L CTRL for weapons, SPACE to push, and L SHIFT to strafe. I was still playing this way when Quake came around, and I never adjusted to using the mouse (I still plug a console controller into the computer for games).
The funniest bit in my game was, as pictured above, when my McAfee just had to interrupt my game with an urgent notification, removing my control in the game, and by the time I figured out why I wasn't firing or moving I'd been mauled by the fuzzy, brown demon.
Finally, I took a run at Rice Beach in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, top-selling portable game for the year. It was a Game Boy release, as Nintendo kept its vice grip on the handheld gaming market.
The few levels I played were fine, with the Wario-added augmentations on the Mario action template adding something different, but nothing mind-blowing. I've read up on the ending of the game being flexible as Wario strives to rebuild his castle after the events of Super Mario Land 2, and the amount of coins you collect throughout all of the levels pay off by way of a bigger and better castle as you earn more. That's a pretty smart way to inspire near-completionism and replaying to try and improve upon your score.
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