Complete transparency here for this piece: This was not originally planned in any way. I had hoped for something else to be ready for the first half of November that's (to some extent) out of my control, and it unfortunately didn't come to pass. I'm under no obligation to provide new writings every week or two... but I like to try. Therefore, instead of the usual introduction I would give this kind of Obscusion B-List article, I've decided to be 100% honest & admit that this was literally started on the prior Wednesday; for stuff like this I try to give myself at least a week, just to think things out & take my time. Also, let's face it, after three prior entries of this subject it's honestly just getting hard to make an intro that's somewhat unique from the prior ones. At least it's been around two years since the previous version of this B-List, which just happened to be how I wound up pacing these, completely by accident. Finally, I just like making these lists, because this is a really fun subject to look into.
Anyway, let's go over still yet another six video games that were ported to hardware that, in essence, really had no reasonable right or reason to be playing them!
In theory, every new piece of gaming hardware needs a handful game types at launch, and I don't necessarily mean specific genres. What I mean is that a good hardware launch should have at least one killer app that makes people want to buy it, at least one title that'll keep people coming back for more over & over, & at least one title that can showcase what the hardware is capable of. For that last example a common direction used to be releasing a port of some sort, something that wasn't capable at all on prior hardware (at least, not without major changes) to show people that this truly was "next-gen". Both the ColecoVision & NES had Donkey Kong, the Genesis had Altered Beast, the SNES had Final Fight & Gradius III, and the Dreamcast & PS2 had SoulCalibur & Tekken Tag Tournament, respectively, among other examples. The Game Boy Advance had a bunch of hardware spectacles for its launch in 2001, showcasing the handheld's ability to handle things that the Game Boy & Game Boy Color never could, and there were also ports of older games. Most of these were ports of 16-bit classics, like Earthworm Jim, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, & the SNES remake of Super Mario Bros. 2/USA, but there was one GBA launch title (for North America & Europe, at least) that dared to go even further & show that the GBA was truly a 32-bit handheld: Rayman Advance.
