 Hello, thank you to Astrodog from the Snestrunk Discord for this idea. Here's a video about some games that are still worth playing today that are featured on consoles or computer systems that time may have forgotten for one reason or another. Let's start with an obvious example. The Nintendo Virtual Boy wasn't exactly a sterling success, and only 14 titles were released in North America. One of them, however, was actually pretty good, titled Virtual Boy Wario Land, and it fits right in with the rest of the Wario Land series, which normally appeared on Game Boy and on Game Boy Advance. So if you liked those games, you'll dig this one too, even if, you know, it's a friggin' Virtual Boy game. Thankfully, due to stuff like emulation, you can play this one on PC or a Raspberry Pi device or whatever. And no, you're not beholden to the dreaded Virtual Boy Red. There is a grayscale mode available if you play through the Beetle VB Core on the Retro Arch emulator. I just stuck with the red for this video, just to hammer home the point that this is a friggin' Virtual Boy game. This is what it looked like originally, and it's still actually pretty good. Like I said, it's like the other Wario Land games, where it's a side-scrolling action platformer only with a 3D gimmick shoehorned in, where you can explore each stage in both the foreground and the background. It doesn't really add a whole lot to the gameplay, and it comes across as kind of gimmicky, but hey, at least the 3D effect makes for some cool boss fights. You've got four lives and a handful of continues, and the typical Wario-style gameplay is here, featuring three power-ups in the form of hats. The bull hat increases Wario's charge attack, and allows him to butt-stomp. The eagle hat allows him to fly, and the dragon hat gives him a flamethrower, but it disables his charge attack. You can even combine hats for even more power-ups, which is pretty cool. There's 14 long levels here, there's multiple endings, and if you 100% this game, you unlock a second quest that's much tougher, which is definitely a good thing, because let's face it. This game isn't the most challenging out there, but still, it's a surprisingly good playthrough on a platform that went absolutely nowhere. Next let's take a look at the Amiga, a PC brand in the 80s made by Commodore, and they were hugely successful all across Europe, but particularly in Germany and the UK. The thing about Amiga games, however, is that, well, they had a certain kind of look and feel to them, especially side-scrolling platformers, but then there's stuff like Rough & Tumble, which is like the Amiga version of Metal Slug, only two years before Metal Slug was made. Holy crap, where did this game come from? Thanks again to Astrodog for pointing this one out. It was programmed by one person, a dude by the name of Jason Perkins, and you run and gun your way through four huge worlds, collecting marbles that unlock exits. And you got your typical slate of weapons here, lasers, missiles, flamethrowers, and the level design here is excellent and keeps the game interesting. The boss fights, once you finally get to them, are also a lot of fun, and provide a cartoonishly huge explosion. You gotta love that. So yeah, if you want to make stuff go boom on the Amiga, play this one any way you can. Here we've got another surprise on the Amiga. It's Yojo, made in 1993, and yes, in the visual department when it comes to art direction and layout, this is what I'm referring to when I talk about the typical Amiga look and feel. However, what stands out about this one is the music. It is freaking awesome. The game itself is pretty good as well, but that soundtrack, damn. When I was a kid, I didn't know a single person who owned Anatari links. It was supposed to be Atari's answer to the Game Boy and Game Gear, and while I'm sure it's a perfectly decent piece of hardware on its own, it just got lost in the shuffle, mostly because there weren't that many good games for it. There is one, however, titled Blue Lightning. The links is answered to Sega's popular Afterburner series. And man, oh man, this game seriously looks amazing for it being made on a handheld console in 1989. It's a pretty traditional flight sim, rail shooter type hybrid with nine missions for you to complete with the usual machine gun and a limited number of missiles you have to use to bring down enemies. And yeah, I admit the gameplay gets a bit repetitive here, but really, I just want to give both the Atari links and this game its due because this looks impressive as hell, and it plays pretty well too. It's surprisingly forgiving, providing six lives, so you've got plenty of time to get used to the controls and actually get through the first few levels and get a feel for the action. This one's a bit more of a curiosity than a must play, but I just thought it made for a good fit for this video because it's an out of nowhere title that really surprised me. Before the iPhone and the iPod, Apple was experimenting with stuff like the Pippin. No, not that Pippin. That's right, Apple got themselves into the home console racket back in the mid-90s, creating the wildly overpriced Apple Pippin in 1996, launching at a price of a whopping $600 in the US. It flopped, and it only produced 18 games, but there's one I want to point out thanks to Coolor from the SNES Drunk Discord. It's Super Marathon, a compilation of two games originally made for the Macintosh, made by a dev team by the name of Bungie, who went on a few years later to develop a little series you might have heard of called Halo. Here we've got a story-driven first-person shooter taking place in the year 2794, and your colonizing planets, blasting aliens, and yep, it's pretty much just Doom with a new coat of paint, but still a lot of people really dig these kinds of games to this day. There's a certain simplicity about them that I can appreciate, and to the Apple Pippin's credit, this is pretty decent for a home console first-person shooter. I mean, if you compare this to the original Macintosh version, they look almost exactly the same, and at the very least, this is still just an interesting look at what Bungie was up to before Halo. Another failed home console from the 90s was the Panasonic 3DO, but unlike the Apple Pippin, this one actually had a few good ports and some decent games on it, like Return Fire. And again, just like Rough and Tumble earlier in the video, this is another game where you just make stuff go boom, only in this case, it's vehicular mayhem. You can control a tank, a helicopter, a jeep, and a mobile rocket launcher, with each having their own varying stats when it comes to firepower, armor, speed, and fuel consumption. And yeah, you just destroy anything that moves, and the sound design here is freaking fantastic. When I say make stuff go boom, stuff goes BOOM! What else could you ask for? Plus one odd wrinkle here is that this game uses public domain music for its soundtrack, which on the surface sounds pretty lame, but the music they picked is perfect. It's everything from Ride of the Valkyries to Flight of the Bumblebee. It's tremendous. Return Fire on the 3DO is a fun time all around. Let's go back to more familiar territory, like the Game Boy Advance. Now Doom has received about a gazillion ports, as you probably know. The Super Nintendo even got one, but it's, uh, not good. The analogy I used when I reviewed it was, if Doom was a Ferrari, then playing Doom on the Super Nintendo is like driving a Ferrari underwater. Yeah, it's impressive that it can run, but that doesn't mean you should play it. The Doom games on Game Boy Advance, on the other hand, believe it or not, they're actually pretty dang good. Sure, the games aren't much to look at, and the blood is taken out, but the sound design is surprisingly fantastic, and the music sounds good, which is saying something for Game Boy Advance, and all the content is here, all the weapons, items, enemies, bosses, levels. They're all here, and the game runs really smoothly. However, they did have to make some sacrifices in order to make it run smoothly, like once you kill an enemy, it disappears, it doesn't stay there, but that's fine. And yes, visually, the game is kind of a mess, but the name of the game here is Performance. Both of these games play so much better than I ever would have expected. Anyway, the point is, I would not have imagined either Doom or Doom 2 to amount to much on the Game Boy Advance, but they're both well worth adding to your collection. They're surprisingly faithful ports and very good playthroughs. Let's stick with PC ports, this time with the Sega Genesis and Sid Meier's Pirate's Gold. And man, oh man, what a surprise this game is. It's one of the earliest examples of an open-world game executed properly on a home console, and the resulting game here is maybe one of the 10 best Sega Genesis games ever. You play as a pirate, duh, and you pretty much do whatever you want, however you want to do it. You can trade goods and earn money properly, you can capture cities and command fleets into battle, you can pillage and plunder other ships, there's tons of missions to complete, you can duel other characters, seek out buried treasure, and tons more. So yeah, on the surface, you may not think a PC port on a home console from the 80s would be any good, but Sid Meier's Pirate's Gold is absolutely worth playing on the Sega Genesis. Finally, let's go back to the old Super Nintendo, and it's funny, I made a video on Super Nintendo Street Fighter games like four years ago, and I still get the occasional comment from someone saying, wow, I had no idea that the Super Nintendo had Street Fighter Alpha 2. And yes, while it does require the help of the SDD One Chip, one of only two Super Nintendo games to do so, this game actually does exist on the Super Nintendo, and not only that, it actually plays surprisingly well. No, it doesn't touch the PlayStation or Saturn versions, not to speak of the arcade edition, but still, it features 18 characters including Akuma, different turbo speeds, and tons of combos, including special moves represented by the charge meter at the bottom. I wouldn't think so on the surface, but it is a good playthrough, and this game is as impressive a piece of work as you will see on the Super Nintendo. And I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.