I always get these oddball games on my radar and end up haunting IGN and Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine for details and release dates. I'm not talking about big games, like Star Fox's Belated Adventures... I'm more along the line of Mister Mosquito.
Right now though, it's The Three Stooges for Game Boy Advance. This is actually an old Cinemaware game, part of a unique family of games that sang like sweet sweet music back on the Amiga. I never had an Amiga - been Apple-bred since Day 1. But a great pal of mine did, back in the days when owning an Amiga was something special. If you'll recall, America used to have tons of different computer systems... all specialized into cute niches. Apples were quirky educational machines. IBMs were confusing and old. Commodores were kind of like an advanced Atari 2600. But Amigas were graphics showponies, literally light years beyond what anybody else was doing. Looking back, they were no better than the Super Nintendo... but in 1986 they were drool-worthy.
I remember playing The Three Stooges on that Amiga, and that nostalgic fuzziness is clouding my memory and forcing me to buy the re-release of the exact same game for GBA, fifteen years later. It's frightening to be playing an Amiga game on a handheld... it's some kind of futuristic trump card, bitchslapping the hell out of my past. But I have one clear impression of Amiga Stooges.
It wasn't that great.
As I recall, it was kind of a dopey board game. The Stooges trudge through square by square, completing various random mini-games in hopes of accruing X dollars before reaching the finish line. Although the first blush of digitized Stooge video and cruddy sound samples was amusing, we quickly burned through it and returned to Shadow of the Beast. You see, the very concept of board-game-as-computer-game was laughable to our small minds... a pointless endeavor, a misuse of technological resources.
But that's just an ugly hobgoblin keeping me down. Perhaps now I can look at it differently; not as an adventure game (which is the only way we could understand this genre back then) but as more of a puzzle game. Not just something you play once for completion's sake and then never play again, like Resident Evil or Ico... but as something quick and genial to pass the time, like Chu Chu Rocket or Tetris. Maybe.
