Main

What's New

Import Stores

Import Reviews

Import Cover Archive

Special Features

Games

The Top 100

Video Game Fiction

Wanted!

Acknowledgements

Forum

Links

In a distant galaxy not too long ago, the forces of evil were hard at work. The evil tyrant Greedy had taken over and enslaved the people, even going so far as to capture and imprision their legendary hero. A desperate plea for help was sent out, and answered by the hero's own son Ristar.

Ristar was released in 1995 for both the Genesis and Game Gear. While being a great Sonic The Hedgehog meets Bionic Commando style platformer, the game went unnoticed for the most part - more than likely because people were focused on the new technology that had arrived that year in the form of the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation, and were ignoring most new 16-bit games (and most Game Gear games, for that matter). Ristar came and went, and to date Sega has not seen fit to bring him back in any new games...

The evil King Drool has sent forth powerful cyber robots to carry out his evil designs. But a team of cool, sunglass-wearing warriors led by Zonk have discovered his plot and risen against him.

Created to be a spinoff of the Bonk series, Air Zonk dropped the platforming format of the earlier games and went with a shooter style of play. Unfortunately, Air Zonk did not prove to be as popular a character as Bonk, and after one sequel he quietly faded away. Of course, this could also be due to the fact that the Zonk games were released during the Turbo's final days. On an interesting side note, Ryan Genno, webmaster of Game Grandpas and frequent visitor to this site, is the world record holder for highest score on the original Air Zonk (his recorded score is 30,332,430).

Listen! Try not too be upset... Your uncle, Dr. Jones... has been... abducted!! Mike, you are the best hope of rescuing Dr. Jones.

Startropics was one of the later NES games. It was a Zelda-esque adventure taking place on a tropical island. The hero, Mike, was just an average high school kid trying to find his uncle, Dr. Jones. Startropics was fairly sucessful, spawning one sequel - Zoda's Revenge: Startropics II. However, Nintendo chose to never release another Startropics game after Zoda's Revenge. Even with the release of the Smash Bros. series, which brought back just about every Nintendo character ever made, Mike has yet to resurface.

Kid Niki, Radical Ninja, has to rescue Princess Margo from the clutches of the evil Stone Wizard.

The original Kid Niki was released in the arcades in 1986, and followed by a NES port a year later (the game was originally by Irem, but was released in the U.S. by Data East on all formats). Despite the "Radical Ninja" subtitle, Kid Niki was only superficially a ninja game. It was more or less a Super Mario Bros. style platformer. After the original game came and went, Kid Niki himself resurfaced in two Japanese-only Famicom games, but after those were released, he faded away in obscurity.

Pit succeeded in his escape and set out on his long adventure to rescue Palutena. Yet to defeat Medusa he had to get the Three Sacred Treasures. Will Pit be able to restore Palutena's light and return it to Angel Land?

Pit was one of Nintendo's most loved characters from the old NES days. The original Kid Icarus was one of the first home games to ever have a password feature, along with Metroid. While not quite as popular as any of Nintendo's huge franchises, Kid Icarus is still fondly remembered. Nintendo did see fit to release a GameBoy version in the early 90s, and rumors circulated for years about an SNES sequel to the original NES game (especially after Super Metroid hit). However, no new Kid Icarus came to pass. Aside from appearing as a trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Nintendo Gamecube, Pit has languished in obscurity, waiting for the day that Nintendo finally sees fit to make an all-new Kid Icarus game...

Mappy is almost always busy at work as a policeman. But, today he is on vacation. Mapico is his girlfriend, and Mappy wants to marry her if he can find the ring that was stolen by the Guchi Gang.

Mappy the policemouse was one of Namco's more "cute" characters. The original Mappy was somewhat of an arcade hit in the early '80s - it was enough of a hit that it spawned a sequel in the arcades as well as a Famicom game. The last time Mappy was seen was in the Namco Museum series for the PlayStation (Mappy was featured prominently in Volume 2, which included the original Mappy arcade game, and he had several cameos in the later volumes). To date, Namco hasn't made any plans to release any more Mappy games.

A vital space station has been taken over by Xybot warriors. Captain Ace Gunn and Major Rock Hardy must infiltrate the station and defeat the Xybot warriors and their leader, the Master Xybot.

Xybots was one of the most interesting games to come out of Atari in the late '80s. It resembled nothing more than a futuristic, 3-D version of Gauntlet, and was a moderate hit upon release, although it never gained the amount of popularity that Gauntlet and a lot of the other games Atari produced did. Technologically it was ahead of its time. No other arcade game up until then had put the player into a 3-D, first-person perspective world - at least without using vector graphics, anyway. Because it was so advanced, there were almost no home versions of the game released. It was planned for the NES, but that fell through, and it did finally show up for the Atari Lynx. After that, Xybots faded into obscurity, taking Ace and Rock with it.

It all began one day when Little Mac and Doc Louis met by chance. Doc became Mac's trainer, teaching him everything there is to know about boxing. Doc and Mac's story continues over a seemingly endless path, until one day a champion is born.

Punch-Out!! was one of the first boxing games to have an identifiable hero - the video game version of Rocky, if you will. Little Mac fought a variety of extremely colorful characters on his way to the title bout (shown here, in a screenshot from the NES Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, which was the original NES version of the game). After Super Punch-Out!!'s release, Nintendo seemed to forget about Little Mac - in fact, while most of Nintendo's characters were included in Super Smash Bros. Melee, the entire cast from the Punch-Out!! series was excluded (along with Mike Jones from Startropics and Pit from Kid Icarus - to an extent. Like I said above, he appeared as a trophy, but nothing else).

It's the gathering of the Neanderthals! Yes, that's right, the cave babes have been captured, and it's up to cavemen Joe & Mac to save them.

Joe & Mac was a Super Mario Bros.-esque game initially released in arcades by Data East (most people may actually know it better by its U.S. arcade title Caveman Ninja). Despite being ported to nearly every existing Nintendo-made system at the time, plus an SNES-only sequel and an arcade sequel, Joe and Mac both faded away into obscurity in a relatively short time.

Guide your brave explorer Winky through the depths of different dungeon levels while collecting treasures from each room and avoiding the dreaded Hall Monsters.

Ah, Winky. One of the earliest identifiable heroes to ever appear in a game, he strode through the dungeons of Venture carrying his bow and arrow, smiling inanely at everything. Venture was ported to serveral of the video game systems of the time - the version I had first played was the Atari 2600 version, released by Coleco. Venture, to my knowledge, was never sequelized and Winky - like a lot of the other early video game heroes - was subsequently forgotten to all but a few of the most hardcore arcade vets. The company that came up with him, Exidy, is also long gone, I believe.