GB's 100 Games: 85-81

Nintendo Home Consoles from the 2000s Edition!

After this next installment, GB's 100 Games will have covered twenty entries across seven systems. And we still haven't seen any entries from my N64, DS, and GBA collections, so look out for those plus more of every other system (except the poor old Game Gear) as we continue to climb the ranks of gaming.

An interesting theme in this set of five is "Games my brother bought that I wound up liking more than him", which has happened numerous times in the last decade. I can usually sense when he buys a new game whether he's going to actually play it or not, and I'm usually right.

85: Thrillville: Off the Rails
Genre: Minigame Collection/Theme Park Sim
System: Nintendo Wii
Developer: Frontier Developments
Publisher: LucasArts
Released: October 9, 2007

I have no idea what possessed my to try this game, as I was certain it would be a shoveled-up pile of minigame collection crap my brother bought on a whim. To my surprise, it was actually surprisingly engaging, and I sunk hours into making a massive theme park. The minigames, as expected, vary widely in quality - but a much larger percentage of them turned out to be solid and fun, to my surprise. Thrillville succeeds by aping the best - Luftwaffe 2 is 1942, Vendor Tender is one of those puzzle games where you shoot pieces out of a cannon on the bottom to make matches on the top, and so on. There's also Sparkle Quest (an animesque platformer), and more traditional theme park games like go-karts and Test Your Strength. There are even games that have you assuming the role of park workers to improve their skills - doing well at the minigames improves your park as your employees receive more training. While the janitor game made sucking up trash and hosing down vomit fairly fun, I had no interest in the rhythm-action game the cheerleaders and suited mascots have.

Thrillville has a decent sense of humor and an appropriately kooky cast of characters. The music is mostly licensed stuff from the last decade or so before release, and the human character designs are kind of ehh. Overall though, I had a lot of fun with Thrillville, and I may yet pick it up again to see what all's left to do in there...

84: Pokemon Colosseum/Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness
Genre: RPG
System: GameCube
Developer: Genius Sonority
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: March 22, 2004/October 3, 2005

Currently the closest we've ever come to a real Pokemon game for consoles, these two RPGs (the first, and by far lowest-ranked, of the RPGs on this list) offer adequate Pokemon battling and a more substantial storyline than any previous Pokemon games had offered. Both games are far more limited than the mainline series, offering only a fraction of Pokemon to catch, few or no wild encounters, no routes between towns and dungeons, and awful, awful names for the characters, especially the random trainers. Whereas the portable games use either normal names or simple puns, Genius Sonority appeared to name its' characters via Ouija board, and it does hurt the presentation slightly. Graphics and sound have issues as well - almost every Gen 1 and Gen 2 Pokemon is reusing its' Pokemon Stadium 2 model, with a slight graphical bump. Gone are the neat high-grade interpretations of Pokemon cries, replaced with the original sounds. Many animations and features from the Stadium games are also gone, leaving these two with nothing to offer but the main quest to make up for the numerous shortfalls compared to both the main games it tries to emulate and the 3D battlers it's clearly based on.

It's a testament to the strength of the Pokemon formula that despite all those shortcomings these games aren't half bad. If you're jonesing for another Pokemon quest after completing all the real games, these two could serve as a band-aid while you await Pokemon X and Y.

83: Mario Superstar Baseball
Genre: Sports
System: GameCube
Developer: Namco
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: August 29, 2005

I have never liked sports, and I have never cared about sports games. Not in the least.

Mario Superstar Baseball is the one sole exception.

One of the last high-profile GameCube games, alongside Mario Party 7 and Pokemon XD, my brother rented this one at our local video store as their pathetic selection of GameCube titles didn't have much else. I was totally taken off guard by the simple, enjoyable, arcadey version of baseball MSB presented, and wound up playing it alongside him. My mom commented she'd never imagined I would be talking baseball lingo at dinner with my brother.

This game also gets kudos for being one of the very, very few to reference the Paper Mario series. Among the many recolors of the playable characters are Anti Guy from Paper Mario 64 and Dark Bones from Thousand-Year Door!

I tried to recapture the magic by renting Mario Power Tennis, but it didn't work out. I'll stick with America's Sport, I suppose.

82: Custom Robo
Genre: Action with RPG elements
System: GameCube
Developer: Noise
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: May 10, 2004

My brother bought this and never played it much. One day I got bored and started a new file, and wound up blasting through the whole thing in a matter of a week or two. There are some RPG elements with how you equip your robot, but all the battles are frantic run-and-guns in a small arena, and if you don't choose your parts carefully you'll get walloped by some of the later foes.

Special shout-out to the inexplicably douchey "Evil", who seems to not have any evil plans in mind beyond A) being great at Custom Robo (like everyone else?) and B) acting like an arrogant fuckwad all the time. The few times you get to fight him, he acts like you handing him his ass didn't count for whatever reason. Kinda wish he got a nice dose of karma at some point, but what can ya do.

81: Pokemon Rumble
Genre: Beat-em-up
System: Wii (WiiWare)
Developer: Ambrella
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: November 16, 2009

Among modern releases, it does not get more repetitive than Pokemon Rumble, a game with the sheer audacity to recycle the same seven obstacle-free stages a dozen times. With graphics lifted from My Pokemon Ranch and absolutely no representation of the 2nd or 3rd gens, Pokemon Rumble is fairly lacking.

And yet, it is still fun. Pokemon games in general manage to be fun despite many shortcomings, with even the main series suffering from a plethora of easily-solved problems that never get fixed. What Pokemon Rumble does do - a fast-paced beat-em-up with Pokemon - it does reasonably well. Well enough to earn a place of recognition here at GB's 100 Games.