This week’s portion of The List features several games that had some kind of cheesy (and some not so cheesy) gimmicks. I’m a sucker for gimmicks, remember?
 |
Sim City |
| Designed by video game visionary Will Wright, Sim City was one a neat little game that put you in charge of every aspect of running a city. Set the stage for many sequels and spinoffs including: SimEarth, SimAnt, and ultimately the enormously popular Sims series of games.
More information is available at Will Wright’s biography. |
|
 |
Skate or Die 2 |
| Sequel to the ‘extreme’ skateboarding game Skate or Die!, the game featured an opening theme with lyrics!
Okay, that was kind of lame, let’s keep this train chugging! |
|
 |
Sonic and Knuckles |
| How cool is this? In an extremely visionary move, Sega released a game that could be hooked up to Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 well after their release to enable you to use Knuckles the Echidna as a playable character, changing the complexion of the game almost entirely.
exitzer0 adds: “Excellent foresight on SEGA’s part to code games ahead of time to accommodate a future expansion.” |
|
 |
Space Shuttle Project |
| Space Shuttle Project was a game where you would take a simulated space shuttle on a simulated mission to simulated space. Unfortunately, I never had any simulated fun with this ‘game.’ I said it was noteworthy, not great.
exitzer0 adds: “Great flight sim game… if you already work for NASA.” |
|
 |
Star Tropics |
| The bane of rental clerks the country over, once you progress so far in the game, you are instructed to place a letter that came in the box under water to reveal a secret code to allow you to continue. Unless you were the first person to rent the game, odds were slim that you even saw the letter, much less were able to dunk it in water. Bear in mind that this was before access to the Internet was widespread, so lots of people got stuck.
The code is 1492. |
|
 |
Starfox |
| Starfox was the first game to use the Super FX chip to add rudimentary 3D support to the Super Nintendo.
More information on the Super FX chip can be found here. |
|
 |
Super Game Boy |
| All right, it’s not technically a game, but it is a peripheral that allows you to play your library of Game Boy games through your Super Nintendo on your television. Eventually supplanted by the Game Boy Player for the GameCube. | |
 |
Super Glove Ball |
| The only ‘super’ thing about this game was the super way that the Power Glove completely doesn’t work with this (the game it was seemingly designed around) or any other game. The commercials made it look so cool, too. | |
 |
Super Mario Bros. |
| Not the first game to star the now famous plumber Mario, Super Mario Bros. was his breakout game and managed to sell a ludicrous amount of Nintendo Entertainment Systems. I’m not going to go into much detail here, you know the story.
exitzer0 adds: “What can be said about this time honored classic. SMB almost single handedly brought about the home gaming market.” I would say that it mostly revived the industry that Atari built. -Ed. |
|
 |
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island |
| This game used the Super FX2 chip (a beefed up version of the original Super FX chip) to not only produce some interesting 3D effects, but also to produce detailed squash and stretch animation that is still technically impressive today. |