The Game Boy Advance was Nintendo’s third portable video game system that used cartridges. I imported the Game Boy Advance from Japan when it first came out. This is the first time I did this for a Nintendo system, and only the third time I ever did it with any system, with the Sega Dreamcast and Sony PlayStation 2 being the only other systems I imported.

The Game Boy Advance has some really great games on it. I love the Mario RPG series, and the GBA has one of the quirkiest and most fun I’ve games played in the series, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. Nintendo released some other really quirky games for the GBA which I really enjoyed, such as Wario Ware which was a series of really fast timed micro-games with some bizarre but fun goals.

I really enjoyed the horizontal layout of the system, as opposed to the vertical layout of the Game Boy. It made it a lot more comfortable, and the button layout felt a lot like the Super Nintendo, except with two less buttons. So far, the Neo Geo Pocket is the most fun I’ve had yet with a portable system, but the Game Boy Advance is definitely a close second.

I love this game! It has so much charm, the gameplay is solid, the jumping mechanics are great, and the designers do so much with the platforming genre that I haven’t seen anywhere else.

In my opinion, Virgin made the best platform games outside of Nintendo in the 1990’s. Cool Spot, Lion King, and Aladdin were among the most fun games I’ve played on the Genesis. In Aladdin, Virgin tried a lot of neat things that I never saw in other platform games, and it worked well. They had sinking floors in the lamp levels, where Aladdin wouldn’t have his footing too well, and he’d slowly sink down unless you had him jump. There were also things that were used in other platform games, but they had some real charm here. In the lamp level, there were platforms of differing sizes that would shrink and then reappear that were genie hands and little genie fingers that flicked you to the other side of the screen like the springs in Sonic the Hedgehog.

The animation was provided by Disney’s own animators, so they were fantastic and bubbling with character. The guards would jump up and down in the “ow ow ow” animation when walking across hot coals, a large guard eating food would lose his shorts the first time you hit him, and the burly guards would taunt you before you got close to them. They also used a few voice samples that sounded really good on the Genesis hardware. The large guard would say “oooh” when he lost his pants, the burly guard shouted “Come on!” when he taunted you, and Genie would exclaim “yeah!” when you reached a midpoint.

The music in the game is digitized versions of the film’s soundtrack, and sound really good considering the hardware limitations. The music that is unique to the game also is really good, catchy, and fits the Aladdin atmosphere perfectly. The boss music in particular is a real standout. I still have that music in my head as I’m typing this.

The game is based on the storyline of the movie, but like I mentioned in my reviews of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and The Black Cauldron, it’s best when games based on movies stick to the story enough to be familiar but deviate enough to make things interesting. Virgin did things right when they made Aladdin, since the storyline is the same, but some of the intros to the levels is a bit different. But, the differences fit the story enough that it doesn’t feel out of place.

This game is one of the highlights of platformers, and of games in general in the 1990’s. It’s definitely one of the best games based on movies that has ever been made. If you’ve never played this game before, you should. You won’t be disappointed.

Game Boy was Nintendo’s first handheld video game console that took cartridges. I never owned a Game Boy when I was a little girl. Sega’s “creamed spinach” commercials worked well for me, since I owned a Game Gear and never had an interest in a Game Boy, despite owning all of Nintendo’s home systems. Many years later, I picked up a Game Boy at a second hand store along with Tetris. I enjoyed it a little bit then, but not enough to entice me to pick up more cartridges. Many more years later when I started collecting video game systems, I decided to give the Game Boy a second chance. I’m glad I did because there are some good games for it, despite it being a black and white system. The Super Mario Land games were the only games in the Mario series that I hadn’t completed for the longest time (although since I don’t own a Wii or a Nintendo DS yet there are many more games I need to complete now). I’m glad I played them now, because they’re very different from the home games in the Mario series, but they’re just as fun.

Super Mario Land was the first Mario platformer for the Game Boy. I never played the Super Mario Game Boy games until recently. I was a Sega Game Gear girl, so the Game Boy came much later in my life. Super Mario Land is very different than the main series. The biggest difference here is the gameplay itself. Each of the other 2D Mario games is pick-up-and-play if you’ve played one because the gameplay remains consistent. Here, the jumping mechanic is very different. It’s not sloppy, it’s just different. Mario jumps at a different rate than he ever did before, so there’s a learning curve involved where you have to discover how to time jumps correctly. Luckily, the jumping is still tight, which is expected in a Mario game, so when you figure out how the jumping works you’re good to go. The fireballs work differently too. They bounce around the entire screen instead of just along the ground, and they can be used to pick up coins you can’t reach. The only thing that bothered me about this game was the mushrooms. You can’t pick them up as soon as they come out of blocks, you have to wait until they fall for a little bit. This means that you’ll jump right through a mushroom sometimes. It’s not too big of a problem, and it’s easily remedied by learning to time jumps differently, but it is annoying especially at first.

That’s just a small nitpick though, since I do love what the game offers. The game takes place in Sarasaland instead of The Mushroom Kingdom, so the enemies and levels are different here. The levels are designed with more of a real world influence, with levels ranging from an Egyptian-themed land with Sphinx enemies, to a land with Moai Easter Island heads as enemies, to the Japanese-themed level with ninjas and music to match.

The things I really liked about this game were the exploding turtles, using the fireballs to get coins you can’t reach, and the horizontal-shooter levels where Mario is in a submarine and in an airplane and shoots out fireballs at enemies and blocks. It was also fun to see some familiar characters, such as the goombas (what would a Mario game be without Goombas?), the pipe plants, the bullet bills, and the plant that shoots fireballs at you from Super Mario Bros 3.

The game is laid out very similarly to the original Super Mario Bros., with stages hyphenated with levels (for example 1-1, 1-2, etc.). Instead of 4 levels per stage, in this game there are 3 stages. After you complete the last stage, you are taken to a screen that is very similar to the “Thank you Mario but our Princess is in another castle” screen, but with Princess Daisy instead of Princess Toadstool. There are only 4 stages in this game, so with 3 levels per stage, that makes only 12 levels altogether, making it a very short game. The fun factor definitely makes up for the shortness though, since the game has the classic charm found in all the games in the Mario series.

The Sega Genesis was my first Sega video game console. I was always a Nintendo fan girl, but my friends had Sega systems. My parents had friends who owned a video store, and I was always in awe of their Sega Master System. I loved Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, and would play it on their Sega Master System whenever I came over. My parents had a one system policy though, and since I loved the Nintendo Entertainment System so much, I definitely had to get the Super Nintendo. My best friend had a Genesis though, so I would play it whenever I went over to his house. When I was old enough that my parents let me earn some extra money, I bought myself a Genesis as soon as I could. I loved my Super Nintendo more, but I don’t regret buying the Genesis one bit. I loved the platformers on that system. They all seemed really different from those on the SNES. I loved the Sonic the Hedgehog games, and Virgin made some of the best platformers on the Genesis in the 1990’s. Cool Spot, Aladdin, and Lion King were all a whole lot of fun. I still play the Genesis from time to time just to experience some of those fun 2D platform games again. They had a whole bunch of charm, and manage to stand the test of time very well.

I was destined to be a gamer. My dad was a gamer. He had an Odyssey and an Atari 2600 before I was born.

I don’t remember much of either, but I do remember how we lost our Atari. It wasn’t because my dad tired of it, it was because he loved the Golf game so much that he played it so often the system got so hot, the cartridge melted into the slot! :)

I was born too late to be into the Atari craze. I was born in the NES era. :) But, when I saw an Atari Flashback 2 at Wal-Mart I had to buy it. It was an Atari all-in-one unit that could actually use Atari joysticks (and Sega Genesis controllers!), and could be modified to use actual Atari 2600 cartridges (although I never modified mine to do that).

The built in games were fun. I always loved the simplicity of Pong, so Arcade Pong took up a lot of my playtime. I’ve always enjoyed Centipede and Millipede in the arcades, so I played a bit of them here too.

I didn’t really start getting into the Atari 2600 until recently though, since I started using ConsoleClassix. You can play Atari 2600, NES, and Colecovision games for free, so I’ve been playing some Atari games I haven’t played before.

I completed one of the few Atari 2600 games with an ending, Adventure, and now wish I still had my Flashback 2 so I could play the sequel to that game that is only available on the Flashback.

It’s actually quite amazing that the Atari can get me wanting to play it at this point. The graphics are dated now, but the gameplay is still solid. And, when it comes to games, gameplay is really what matters most.

I got The Shivah for free during the Wadget Eye Games Yom Kippur special a few weeks ago.

While humorous adventure games are my favorite, I do enjoy the occasional serious adventure. And this was definitely a serious adventure I enjoyed. While it was a short game, it took me a while to get the good ending. There’s one more ending that I want to try though. I really like it when adventure games have multiple endings, because they are so linear that you don’t really want to replay them too soon after completing them otherwise.

Another thing I really liked about this game was that when you finished the game, there’s DVD style extras. There’s blooper audio files that come up when the game is completed on the good ending, and you can view the game with DVD style commentary if you want to.

I was looking through the free NES selection they had at the video game rental site Console Classix and came across DuckTales. I played through it again tonight for the first time since I was a little girl.

The game follows Scrooge McDuck as he once again tries to beat Flintheart Glumgold to the world’s greatest treasures so that he can remain the richest duck in the world. The game has you scouring the Earth, from the Amazon to the Himalayas, in search of treasure, and one level even takes place on the moon. Unlike most platforming games of the time, the game isn’t completely linear. You can choose which level you want to play and in which order. Most of the supporting cast shows up in the game (Huey, Dewey and Louie, Launchpad, Gizmoduck, Bubba, Webbigail and Mrs. Beakly) with the exception of Gyro Gearloose and Duckworth. Throughout the game, fans of the show will notice some characters from different episodes showing up as enemies in certain levels.

True to the show, all Scrooge has to defend himself on his expeditions is his trusty cane. But here, it seems to have been fitted with a pogo stick attachment (which isn’t at all a stretch, considering all the inventions Gyro has made for Scrooge over the years), which will help Scrooge through areas that can’t be crossed by foot. You’ll find yourself using the pogo stick a lot, but in the Himalayas Capcom has made Pogo sticking a little harder by making Scrooge get stuck in the snow if he pogo sticks in it, which requires a little bit more strategy to the play.

The game is just as much fun as I remember from when I first completed it as a little girl, although it’s not nearly as hard for me now as it was back then. :)

I went with my mom to the 25th annual Spiedie Fest in Binghamton on the last day of July. We went for the hot air balloons, but we had to try a Spiedie. Mom had a sandwich that was called a Spiedie years earlier in Elmira, but it wasn’t the real thing. The one she had was just meat marinated in spiedie sauce and put on a dry roll.

We split a buffalo chicken and bleu cheese speidie wrap. It was absolutely delicious! The restaurant that ran the tent was called Brothers 2, and they are located in Endwell, NY. The meat was cooked on an open flame wood grill. I’m not the biggest fan of bleu cheese dressing, but I do like it if it’s cooked into the meat. The chef said that he believes that the buffalo chicken and bleu cheese speidie wrap is the best Brothers 2 makes, and I’m definitely not going to argue with him. It’s been over a week since I ate the speidie and I still can imagine the way that it tasted as I’m writing it just like I ate it yesterday!

There was a little hot dog and hamburger place in the mall that I loved, but it’s closed now. My mom and I went to the mall today to eat in the food court, and I was happy to see that a similar shop had opened up in the same location.

I was looking through the menu, at the hot dogs and steak sandwiches, when I came upon the gyros section. I had never eaten a gyro, but I had heard good things about them. I tried lamb at the fantastic Blue Dolphin Greek restaurant once, and did not like it very much.

But, I had read several articles on gyros that said that lamb was the way to go, so I decided I’d be brave and try the beef and lamb gyro.

I’m really glad I did. :) The lamb still had a hit of it’s odd taste (I call it the “lamb” taste, since there’s really no way to describe it – it’s not sweet, it’s not salty, it’s not tangy, sour or bitter. I’m positive lamb has it’s own taste bud section on the tongue. :D), but the gyro sauce, and toppings of cucumbers, sour cream, and tomatoes actually complimented the flavor. It was really good. :)