$250. Just pause for a minute and let that figure sink in. It's the going price for a particular game, complete-in-box. No, not Chrono Trigger. Not Final Fantasy VI. Not…okay, I have been asked to pay that much for SoldierBlade or ShockMan, props if either was your guess, but for this write-up I'm referring to a different obscure little gem, by the American studio WayForward, released in 2002 for, of all platforms, Gameboy Color. The game? Shantae. And I am tempted to say it was worth every penny.

When I was younger, I thought Final Fantasy III was an awesome game that everyone should totally play because it was, like, the the FF Tactics jobs system before there was even a FFV. Now that I'm older and wiser, I think FFIII is a game that every fan of the series should play, in its original form (perhaps modulo fan translation), for historic context if nothing else. Very nearly every feature of Final Fantasy IV appears to have been prototyped in III.

Tri-Ace Studios, Enix, in the year 2000

<Odin> (on phone) 'lo?  … Yeah, same old same old. It's good to be the king. You? … Cool, cool. Alright, will do. 'Later!
<Freya> Who was that?
<Odin> Frank--Vanir, big horns, you've met once or twice. Says they're ready to rumble. Man, this age's Ragnarok is gonna be epic!

Ask anyone who was flying the Nintendo flag around the turn of the century and they're likely to tell you that they spent a good amount of their time playing GoldenEye. It's often cited as one of the Nintendo 64's greatest games and it's certainly a seminal title in the console first-person shooter canon. My friends loved to slog away at the multiplayer even a good four years after its release. Meanwhile, those who wanted an FPS with a original storyline kept jabbering on about something called Half-Life. I was bored of 007 and unsure about Gordon Freeman, but it didn't matter. I'd happened upon something that offered the best of both worlds.

I came across Rare's Perfect Dark back in 2001, thanks to dumb luck. I never had much money in my wallet at that time, and most N64 games I really wanted to play cost around £50. I spotted Majora's Mask in the pre-owned section for the first time at half its RRP and decided I would return later to grab it. Fortunately, it had gone, so I instead walked home with what soon became my favourite FPS game of all time.

January 1990. Listen up, soldier. This is a message from S.A.B.R.E. (Special Assault Brigade for Real Emergencies). We have an urgent need to spread the word about a great open-ended platform game for the Nintendo Entertainment System known as Clash at Demonhead. Your R and R is now over. Report to your game cave, and let's get to work.

What the heck am I talking about? Well, if you had the game you'd still be saying the exact same thing. This game is one of the craziest fun platformers to come out of the late generation of the NES. Clash at Demonhead stars you as Sergeant Bang! The intro stills show you resting on the beach with your girlfriend when a message interrupts: A new bomb has been created that will -- of course -- destroy the world.

First, thanks where thanks are due. This article would not have happened were it not for the Commonwealth-Edison electric company of greater Chicago leaving me 56 uninterrupted hours to enjoy no games requiring more power than a pack of AA batteries. Way to go.

With that out of the way, let's talk about the game. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening has aged REMARKABLY WELL. Released in 1993, it is the first "out-of-canon" Zelda game in the series. Rather than focusing on gathering eight pieces of save-the-princess/defeat-Ganon hardware, Link finds himself on a mysterious island collecting musical instruments in order to awaken a mythical entity called the Wind Fish ("The Wind Fish in name only, for it is neither...") from within a giant egg on top of a mountain. Along his way, he encounters a cast of unusual characters -- some eerily reminiscent of people he knows from the outside world, some making cameos from other contemporary games, and many simply unique.

1987 -- how rad was it? I had my Vision skate clothes and my Nash board. The NES was well on its way to making history before anyone knew it. Then there I sat at my local rental shop looking at this awesome cover of a dude doing a hand plant, with the words SKATE OR DIE emblazoned in graffiti above him

I MUST PLAY THIS GAME.

Ultra Games produced this title for our enjoyment. It featured many different play styles from downhill racing, pool jousting, and half pipe shredding, plus a couple more. We saw a few characters in the game -- like Rodney Recloose, who was the crazy dude you saw when you started the game in the skate shop. He sported a purple mohawk and tattoos. He had a crazy kid named Bionic Lester with green hair and a nasty attitude in events like the joust and downhill. He would cut you off and knock you on your face faster than you could say "shredded."

For some reason, all the ways I can think of starting to describe Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master involve Essence of Ninja packed tightly into a 16-bit cartridge by ninja highly trained in the art of packing Essence of Ninja into 16-bit cartridges.

Shinobi III was released by Sega for the Genesis in 1993. While the Shinobi series is broader and more complex than even I was aware of prior to researching this article, RotNM has one very key distinction over its predecessors and even some successors. Previous Master System and Genesis titles were about walking around slowly and throwing shuriken at things. Previous Game Gear titles featured flips, ceiling-walks, and slashing stuff, but never as the same character. They were also about rescuing Power Rangers and recovering magical rainbow crystals. The most recent PS2 game is about some magic demon wizard stuff and getting killed by your own sword.

Shinobi III, by contrast, is about flipping out and killing people. More specifically, it's about flipping out and killing explosive zombie-soldiers armed with automatic weapons, slicing up giant bioengineered meat-golems, horse-stomping ninja super-soldiers, jetboard-flying-kicking heavily armed marine tank robots, destroying robo-godzilla, scaling cliffs by jumping between falling boulders, navigating entire areas using only wall-jumps, katana-ing heavily armed airships out of the sky, and I think something about an evil super-ninja trying to take over the world, but that's only the plot, and if you know what the plot is, you obviously aren't very familiar with the concept of Ninja-ing.