Pokémon. Great RPG or crack for kids? You decide.

All I wanted when I got my imported see-through clear Gameboy Color was a copy of Pokémon Red. Turns out that Pokémon was kind of popular back in 1998 and it was sold out, so I was forced to settle for Link's Awakening DX (which turned out just fine in retrospect). I waited three long weeks, riding my bike to the local game store uphill both ways before I was finally able to snag myself a copy. In the end, it was well worth it. Say what you like, but I am a huge PokéManiac.

Startropics is probably one Nintendo franchise that you have never heard of

I don't know of many games that have you soaking the manual (or at least an included letter found in it) in water to continue on in the game, but out of all of them that I know of (which is only one, incidentally), Startropics is the best. Nintendo doesn't release many games like Startropics any more nowadays. Puzzles, fun story, interesting characters...Startropics has it all. When the game was re-released on the Virtual Console, I jumped all over it because there really hasn't been an experience like it from Nintendo since.

Man, that "Final" Fantasy sure doesn't look to have a finale anytime soon, does it?

The legend of Final Fantasy goes like this: Square was in financial trouble at the time of the games release in 1987, and had the game not sold well, the company would have been forced to declare bankruptcy. In truth, Hironobu Sakaguchi tells the tale a little differently.

The name ‘Final Fantasy’ was a display of my feeling that if this didn’t sell, I was going to quit the games industry and go back to university. I’d have had to repeat a year, so I wouldn’t have had any friends – it really was a ‘final’ situation.”

Golden Sun might be the best RPG series to grace any Nintendo console. Well it's my favorite anyways.

If you couldn't tell by now, RPGs are kind of my thing. There is just something about interacting with a good plot that you can't get in any other medium that makes video games so great, and almost no genre has better storytelling (usually) than RPGs. That and they usually have a pretty wicked musical score, case in point Golden Sun for the Game Boy Advance.