Ah, Game Boy: The system that ruled the world on the strength of both its portability and its support for multiplayer gaming. Remember Tetris? Remember Pokémon? Remember F-1 Race and its four-player adapter? So naturally, when Taito brought Bubble Bobble—a cooperative arcade game designed to be played (and only fully completed!) with a second player—to Game Boy, naturally they made heavy use of its link capabilities for teaming up with a friend, right? Uh... right?

Oh well. At the least the title screen music for this episode's import title rocks hard enough to make you forget your disappointment in Bubble Bobble.

And yes, this episode I've finally taken advice from years of drive-by commenters and have palced myself briefly on-camera. We'll see if putting a human face in there makes this series more personable or appealing or whatever to the average viewer. It seems unlikely that people actually want to see THIS particular face, but it's the best I can do to obey the rules of gaming YouTube without going full screamy-thumbnail.

Video Works is funded via Patreon (http://www.patreon.com/gamespite) — support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its YouTube debut! And be sure to check out the Retronauts podcast (http://www.retronauts.com), where I (and many others!) tackle a much wider array of classic gaming topics each week.

Our first of third Lynx overviews for 1990 looks at the system's own home-brewed arcade legacy... well, sort of. Here, arcade titles by Atari Games (the game design company) make their way to a system distributed by Atari Corp. (the home computer company). Does the close connection between the two make for memorable coin-op conversions, or is Atari's post-crash selloff a rift that could never be repaired? Spoilers: It's the former.

These are some excellent handheld adaptations of several popular arcade releases from the late ’80s, performing at a technical level that far outstrips anything the Game Boy or Game Gear could manage. The one exception to this rule is the one arcade sequel (sort of) that was originally developed by Epyx as a completely different property. (It shows.)

Video Works is funded via Patreon (http://www.patreon.com/gamespite) — support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its YouTube debut! And be sure to check out the Retronauts podcast (http://www.retronauts.com), where I (and many others!) tackle a much wider array of classic gaming topics each week.

I had intended to take a deep dive into the history of Mr. Driller once Mr. Driller 2 showed up in Game Boy Works Advance, but then Bandai Namco had to go and remaster the best game in the series before I got there. So I've jumped the gun a bit for this combination retrospective (of the franchise) and review (of Mr. Driller DrillLand). It's terribly self-indulgent and overlong, but I'm afraid that's just how it has to be.

Special thanks to GSK and Quintin Marcelino for their contributions to this episode, and to Bandai Namco for providing a review code of the U.S. release of DrillLand.

A second Double Dragon release for 1990 lands on Game Boy... except not really. In Japan, Double Dragon II was presented as an expanded remake of the original Renegade—which is to say, Kunio-kun's first adventure. Acclaim and Technos gave it a facelift for western release a year later, turning into a Double Dragon game in name if not in fact. Still, while this "sequel" lacks some fundamental essentials found in the arcade game, it does allow for simultaneous play—so that's something. Also this episode: An equally rocky Japan-exclusive conversion of German board game Scotland Yard.

Special thanks this episode to my nephew Speedy Playz for his help with the two-player video capture. Please subscribe to his channel and help encourage him as he learns to create his own video projects! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrBYYIWQIjrUV2-44L4vUdQ/

Game Boy wasn't the most powerful portable on the market back in the early ’90s—that was Atari's Lynx. Just what did Atari have to offer gamers in the place of international hits like Mario and Tetris? With this first Lynx-centric overview, we'll look at Nintendo's contemporary handheld competition and see what the most established name in gaming brought to the table for those who weren't content with murky green monochrome or portable platforms that could actually fit in a pocket.

Metroidvania games and action-RPGs are closely intertwined, and perhaps no developer had more influence on the shape and direction of action-RPGs like Nihon Falcom. This episode is devoted to their follow-ups to the original Dragon Slayer and Xanadu... as well as an all-new property that would become one of the company's best-loved works. Though not all the games here fall into the metroidvania category, it's hard to deny that style of game would look quiet different without all the essential work Falcom did here.

The NES's 1988 lineup begins with the debut of a gaming legacy. Renegade gave us both the River City/Kunio franchise AND the Double Dragon franchise, and given what lies ahead in the near future for both NES and Game Boy, we definitely need to have a look into the origins of these brawly species. Special thanks this episode to Steve Lin and the Video Game History Foundation.

The metroidvania genre expanded greatly in 1987 as developers grew more confident in their design concepts and technology began to expand to accommodate their ambitions. Nintendo's Famicom/Disk System/NES platform proved to be especially fertile ground for innovation, as these three different takes on the format demonstrate. While you could arguably classify Zelda II, Rygar, and The Goonies II as action-RPGs, each one interprets that concept in unique ways. The one thing they have in common? They attempt to push the creative boundaries of the 2D platformer by shifting viewpoints and perspective at various times: Zelda II with an abstracted, Dragon Quest-inspired overworld view, Rygar with a Zelda II-style top-down action format, and The Goonies II with a first-person adventure mode.