The Jeff Gerstman Hall of Fame

Rambo: First Blood - Part II for the Sega Master System. Releasing in 1986, the game finds itself right at home alongside other early action shooters like Commando and Ikari Warriors. Sega cooked up a neat little movement mechanic that gives it its own feel, too. Can you think of any other games that tried to handle movement this way? Let me know.

One of the Commodore 64's finest budget motocross games is also one of the games that, in some weird way, shaped Jeff Gerstmann's early history with video games. Let's look at the Mastertronic classic, Action Biker, which may or may not feature Clumsy Colin and KP Skips. What's a KP Skips, anyway?

Bruce Lee was ahead of its time with a world that felt larger and a bit more open than the typical action game of its era. For funsies, we're also going to check out a great homebrew port of the game to the Sega Master System.

Yukon Yohan is on the loose and only our Canadian hero, Bounty Bob, can save us! Watch the next installments into The Jeff Gerstmann Hall of Fame, Miner 2049er and Bounty Bob Strikes Back!, as you run, jump, carefully jump, and time your jumps to succeed in this pair of stone cold classic platformers. Easily two of the best games to ever hit the Atari 400/800 platform.

This time out we're talking about the early 16-bit era with Sega's hot ninja release, The Revenge of Shinobi. This ended up being one of a small number of games I played when the Genesis was new, before there was such a thing as a "Sonic the Hedgehog" to help define Sega's new attitude. It's got an unbeatable soundtrack, solid action, and boss fights that were downright litigious. No, seriously, Sega had to reissue this game a few different times because they pretty much put Batman, The Terminator, and Spider-Man in it. Also? The ninja magic is radical. I put it all to good use here in this video... even if nailing the timing on that double jump eluded me a bit here and there. It's a good one! It's a tough one! It's The Revenge of Shinobi!

We've got another double shot this time around, though that's mostly just so I can officially induct Pitfall II: Lost Caverns after playing through the Atari 800 version of the game on a stream recently. After briefly revisiting that game in the context of the induction, it's on to the real deal, Doug Smith's Lode Runner. It's a classic action/puzzle game that takes some of the basic hole digging gameplay from Space Panic (or Apple Panic, if you're more familiar with that A2 clone of the arcade original) and adds gold, puzzles, and shredding guitars. Oh wait, no, the shredding guitars were my addition to the game as I played it obsessively for what seems like years, but in reality... I bet it was the summer of 1984.ir? Can Little Samson survive my daughter's runny nose? Time to put this operation to the ultimate test.

This game came out in 1998, which practically means it's brand-new when compared to most of the other games that have made their way into the Hall so far. I'm talking about NFL Blitz '99, the second game in the Blitz franchise and the first one to allow four players to play at the same time. This one is technically exclusive to arcades, as "NFL Blitz 2000" would come home on the Dreamcast and other platforms the following year. Also, there would be one more arcade release after this one, NFL Blitz 2000, which was also bundled in a "Gold Edition" alongside NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC, Midway's final attempt to do an NBA Jam-like game in arcades.

Space Taxi is a stone-cold classic from 1984, merging some concepts and structure from 1983's Jumpman with gameplay that's based in part on 1979's Lunar Lander. The video contains what might be some of the best performances I've ever put in on Space Taxi, which is pretty surprising after all these years. With 25 levels and a wide variety of weird ideas, this one takes a basic concept and stretches it into an absolutely wonderful little game that I bet would work quite well today.

This game was always on the list I keep in my head of "games we need to talk about someday," but after it came up on a stream a few weeks back, it jumped right up to the head of the line. 1985's Law of the West is probably a visual novel from the days before we called them "visual novels." It's not the deepest game in the world, but the dialogue trees and options at your disposal did a great job of making the possibilities seem way larger than they probably are. As a kid, this game felt totally different every time you played it, whether you were sweet-talking the criminals into submission or gunning down everyone in sight... it was up to you. I can't tell you how many times I popped this C64 disk into a drive and played through it. It may be more load time than video game, but this is great game that I still probably pop in once a year or so... thankfully emulation can help with those load times these days.

When we talk about early platformers, we usually end up talking about Donkey Kong. Or, if we're pretending to be historians, we bring up Space Panic. Few people truly want to talk about Space Panic, which is fine. It hasn't exactly aged well. It came out in 1980 and felt dated by 1981. Instead we tend to think about games that let you jump. Take, for example, Randy Glover's Jumpman. "Jump" is right in the name. You know what you're getting here, right off the bat. But it's more than just jumping. Jumpman and its follow-up, Jumpman Jr., are great, early exercises in level design and the importance of little gimmicks. Most of the levels here put their own unique spin on things, be it occasional fireballs, moving ladders, disappearing platforms, and more.

a copy, Trance Vibrator and all. It felt like the culmination of Sega's stylistic efforts at the time, alongside games like Phantasy Star Online, Jet Set Radio, Cosmic Smash, and Space Channel 5. The Dreamcast might've been failing in the marketplace, but the company and its then-somewhat-independent studios were at a creative peak.

Between its recent 30-year anniversary and the recent release of Mortal Kombat 1, I've been thinking a lot about the original Mortal Kombat. It seemed like a good time to revisit the game that launched the franchise, something that hasn't aged all that well when compared to even its immediate sequel, Mortal Kombat II. But its impact on gaming is undeniable. Its impact on my career, weirdly enough, is similarly undeniable. As someone who has been doing this for about as long as there's been a Mortal Kombat, it's weird to think that MK has more or less always been there, continuing to release sequels regardless of whatever weirdness its parent company has been going through. The larger story of the franchise is perhaps a topic for another day, but for now lets take a long look at the arcade game and discuss its impact, both in and out of the home.

Remember the dual-joystick shooter boom that happened alongside the rise of the Xbox 360? Xbox Live Arcade made a lot of those games possible, but none of it would've happened if not for Robotron: 2084. The 1982 arcade release popularized the dual-stick format... though you wouldn't really see a more dual-joystick games out there until Eugene Jarvis made another one in 1990, Smash TV. These days, everything from Geometry Wars to Vampire Survivors owes a little something to this Williams classic.

Street Fighter II was released on a zillion different platforms, including the PC, back when it first broke big in arcades. A lot of those official ports, however, are pretty terrible. Let's take a look at an unofficial port out of South Korea known as SF2IBM. The game was largely created by a single programmer who got the SF2 graphics via a Super Nintendo and a capture card, resulting in a blurry, distorted mess. That said, it's probably still somehow better than the official port to DOS.

It doesn't happen like this anymore, but back in the computer days you'd sometimes just end up with a bunch of floppy disks full of games. While there were usually specific games you were looking for on each disc, they'd be filled up with bootleg copies of who-knows-what. Back when I was obsessed with my Atari 800, I stumbled my way into disks full of mystery games. No instructions, no idea where they came from, how were they played? There was only one way to find out. This time out, let's take a look at Zeppelin and Hard Hat Willy for the Atari 800, two games that I just kinda ended up with... but both made a lasting impression. As a bonus, one of these games seemed to never end up actually being released? Weird. Weird!

These two Commodore 64 games are forever linked in my mind, both because of when I played them and also the shared concept between them. Let's look at Space-Pilot and Battle Through Time. ALSO, let's look at the arcade games they "borrowed" from, while we're at it, because those games are pretty amazing, too!

This time out I wanted to take a break from single entries to focus on some key moments in games that, honestly, wouldn't make the Hall any other way. Sometimes the most middling of games can have some killer little features! So let's honor a trio of these games in a new, special wing of the Hall of Fame.

Sometimes you just need a great puzzle game you can chip away at every night before bed. They don't get much better than HAL's Picross 3D for the Nintendo DS.