There was a time, not so long ago, when the idea of another puzzle game sounded like pure suffering. Thankfully, some janky imports put things in perspective... and, of course, it helps that this latest puzzler—Asmik's Catrap, a remake of 1985's Pitman—is pretty darned good on its own, too.

Game Boy gets its first old-school dungeon crawler, one of the least common genres on the system. This one offers an atypical setting for the genre (ancient Japan!), which is aesthetically cool yet somewhat frustrating in practical terms: The game text, which has never been localized or fan-translated into English, displays entirely in cumbersome traditional hiragana script (even English loanwords like "damage"). So it's a bit tough to play if you're not comfortable with reading awkwardly displayed Japanese text—and the heavy need for grinding up experience points doesn't help. It's not a bad RPG, though! Just a bit unfriendly to foreigners.

A look back at Nintendo's Wild Gunman, the first-ever NES light gun game, and a shooter whose simple design belies its remarkable heritage. Best known in the U.S. for its faked-up cameo in Back to the Future Part II, Wild Gunman was to Japanese fans at the time the latest entry in a line of product evolution that stretched back more than a decade.

Both Florent Georges' book The History of Nintendo 1889-1980 and the Before Mario blog (www.beforemario.com) were invaluable resources as I researched this retrospective. Be sure to check them out!