Game Collection: Some More Portable Lovin!

Let me continue to show you my portable game collection.
(Handy as much of my big system stuff has additional releases added to it.  Actually a lot of stuff does so expect at least one big OTHER PICKUPS post sometime.  The problem with doing my collection pictures is that it makes me want more stuff.)



We shall start with the most unfairly maligned portable system ever, the N Gage.

Nokia in 03-04 had an idea, a vision.  To make a portable videogame system that was also a cell phone.  Sadly their initial design cost 300 dollars, you had to remove the battery to swap games, it was normal cell phone screen ratio, and talking in it was like holding a plastic taco to your ear.

It did not.. do well.  They later on improved it with the QD which got rid of the taco phone element, made it about a 100 bucks in 05, allowed you to swap games without battery removal, and made the machine look nicer while merely having some mild audio system reductions.

It is still my cell phone.

It had some great games released later in its' life, mostly as online only ordering after the machine had been considered a joke.

See the N Gage is basically on par with the Sega Saturn.  Great 2d performance but not so hot 3d.  It is roughly as good as said Saturn too.

But let's see my games!

Catan is just that!  Settlers of Catan but on your phone.  Civilization is pretty much Civ 2 on the PC but again, its in your pocket.  (And better than the Civ Revolution games.)  Colin McRae Rally is a rather good 3d rally racing game.  High Seize is a complete rip off of Nintendo's Advance Wars series.  But its with PIRATES in the Pirate age.  Which makes it pretty awesome.  Mile High Pinball is a decent pinball game.  Pathway to Glory and its sequel, Ikusa Islands are AMAZING tactical wargames.  Brilliant titles.  Worth purchasing the system for.  (And the basic system was dumbed down for that 40K PSP game.) Rifts Promise of Power is a pretty good RPG using the Rifts game system.  Requiem of Hell is a meh Diablo clone.  Pocket Kingdom is.. weird.  It wants to be a funny version of Dragon Force but.. kind of fails especially due to a baaaad interface.  The Roots is another action RPG but I haven't messed with it enough.  Same thing with both Splinter Cell games.  Not enough playing of em.  They are a 2d and 3d stealth action game.  Glory in Death is the ONLY Warhammer 40K electronic game to actually use the Warhammer 40K ruleset.  (Late 3rd edition rules.)  Worms World Party is.. Worms.  Meaning its good.  Xanadu Next is an ok action RPG ruined by bad framerates.

Another portable system I have is the Game Gear!

Basically a Sega Master System with a reduced resolution but increased color palette, the Game Gear is notorious for eating batteries like a fat man eats food at an all you can eat buffet.  Also a huge percentage of titles were just cut down Genesis games or SMS ports.  And the capacitors inside it tend to die requiring repairs.

I had one, sold it, and later on got another from Ebay cheap.  Where most of these games came with it so I haven't played them.  

I pretty much bought it for the Shining Force game.   Dragon Crystal is a Roguelike.  I really only want the few RPGs made for it, and maybe the SMS converter so I have an easy way to play SMS games without dragging out the console.

Of course there are failures that people loved, such as the Neo Geo Pocket Color.

SNK's answer to the Game Boy Color, it was a revamp of the original Neo Geo Pocket which wasn't color, a stupid thing for the late 90s.  The Color was a great little machine that owned the utter licensed dross that infested (and usually still does) most of Nintendo's machines of the N64 and later era.

The NGPC has one of the best portable controllers ever made, a glorious clickly thumbstick perfect for fast action and precision controls.  It plays its games smoothly and they all look really good, though many fighting games have low color sprites.  

It was sadly cancelled when a gambling company bought SNK and decided to drop nearly every thing they were doing to help make Pachinko crap.  (Thankfully another company would get the videogame rights and are now known as SNK Playmore.)

Baseball Stars is a decent baseball game though not a patch on the NES classic.  Biomotor Unitron is an.. interesting RPG I never got around to finishing.  Bust a Movie Pocket is the glorious bubble popping puzzle game.  Card Fighter's Clash is a great CCG game using Capcom and SNK characters.  (The DS sequel isn't  half as good.)  King of Fighters R2 is a decent portable KoF with cutesy character sprites.  Faselei! is a really cool mech SRPG that uses a simple programming command system for combat.  (And was only released in English and boxed in Europe meaning I was lucky to get a copy for MSRP.)  Magical Drop Pocket is another puzzle game and it really kicks ass thanks to the amazing controller on the NGPC.  Match of the Millennium is possibly the best portable fighting game ever made with fun minigames, tight control, and a good variety of SNK and Capcom characters.  Metal Slug 1st Mission is Metal Slug for your pocket.  I still need the sequel though.  Neo Turf Masters is a decent golf game.  And Samurai Shodown 2 is another solid fighter.  (Meaning I really just need the all SNK women fighting game and I pretty much have all the games I really want for this machine.)

And we will finish it up with the most popular but least deserving portable game system ever, the Nintendo Game Boy (Color).  This machine line won early on for being relatively cheap and having a MASSIVE battery life.  However the original Game Boy has one of the WORST screens ever.  A pea soup green with so much pixel ghosting during anything its nearly impossible to play any action games on it.  A shame because it really had some great games.  Later on smaller versions with better screens arrived, culminating in the Gameboy Color which was a somewhat supercharged Game Boy with color added in.  And still smaller than the original brick machine.

The latter mostly sold on the late 90s Pokemon craze and lead to a massive glut of kiddie license shovelware junk which infests so much of Nintendo's third party releases.  

Sadly like the Game Gear, I had a Game Boy with a ton of good games and got rid of them all when I got out because DURR DON'T NEED PORTABLE GAMES ANY MORE, even though some of my favorite games have been on portable machines since.  Admitted, I could have gotten a Super Game Boy for my SNES and played the Game Boy titles better on a TV but.. I was younger, dumber, and going through a lot at the time.  And I did end up with a boxed copy of the now sought after Chrono Trigger for selling the portable games.  So it wasn't a total washout.

(Course with machines like the original Game Boy and Game Gear it is sort of understandable as they weren't exactly pocket sized and had serious limitations.)

My collection of original format Game Boy titles.  All of the Final Fantasy rereleases.  Adventure is actually the first Mana series action RPG, and the Legend series are actually SaGa Frontier series titles.  Pretty decent if weird RPGs.  Legend of the River King is a FISHING RPG.  Sadly it sucks.  Pokemon Red is the only Pokeymans game I ever finished and not in the GOTTA CATCH EM ALL sense.  I have 2 of the 3 original Game Boy Castlevania games though the third eludes me because at cheapest a loose no manual version goes for 32 bucks on Ebay in spite of it not being highly regarded.  (And it is no longer canon.)  Belmont's Revenge is the only one of the three considered good.  And its nigh unplayable on an original Game Boy.  Looks good on my Gamecube Game Boy Player though.  Which is how I beat it.  Donkey Kong is an action puzzle game.  It starts like a mostly black and white (uses some SNES GB Player color trick stuff encoded into it) remake of Donkey Kong, but after the initial 4 arcade levels it turns into a massively hard and devious action puzzler.  Fun, but it gets frustrating.

And my meager Color collection.  Heroes of Might & Magic 2 is HoMM 2 only portable and cut down to be on an 8 bit machine.  (But still good.)  Pocket Bomberman is an action platform puzzler and not a normal Bomberman game.  Super Mario Bros. Deluxe is the classic NES game plus the JPN only sequel with a smaller viewing area but bonus content.  Yars' Revenge is a remake of the Atari 2600 classic with tons of levels.  You will get tired of it though.  Tons of levels but after a point its basically more of the same.  Tower is a single player real time 1st person RPG in the Dungeon Master style.  I just.. didn't like it much.  Aliens: Thanatos Encounter is a top down Gauntlet styled game but.. not very fun at least on an actual machine.  Also inferior to the Alien Breed series on the Amiga and DOS PCs.  (Which was an Aliens ripoff.  But awesome.)

This covers all of my lesser portable machines.  The Nintendo DS and Gameboy Advance I have enough stuff to make each their own installment.   

Sadly for whatever reasons these portables I just do not own a lot for.  My wanting complete with manuals or super cheap sort of hurts me now, and back in the day the machines either went away too fast, or had very terrible libraries of games.