I'm continuing to dive into the obscure world of PC-98 mahjong games with this DR2 (dora dora, I guess?) Night Janki.
This is a honestly a game more interesting for its history than for what it actually is. It's the first game created by Leaf, eroge branch of game publisher Aquaplus. This company was originally established as U-Office in 1994 by former TGL composer Naoya Shimokawa, with the help of another TGL colleague, Shinji Orito. Their goal was focused on music, but they quickly shifted to making games.
Well, turns out making games is hard, and DR2 Night Janki was forgotten for a reason.

This is your standard 1-on-1 strip mahjong soft. At the start, you're presented with two modes: AVG (adventure game) mode, which is the standard story mode, and practice mode, where you can play against the various girls as much as you want (if you want to train your mahjong skills against a cheating AI, here's your chance).
The story of the game is paper-thin, even for the genre. You play as a detective named Ryuuji known for his psychic abilities and outrageous riichi mahjong skills (what a resume). He receives one day an invitation to an ancient mansion. He's not the first one to get one, but everyone before him who went there never came back (not a good sign, I'd say). Obviously our protagonist is made of different stuff and is up and ready to solve the mansion's mystery. To get to the heart of things, he'll have to fend off a number of demon girls inhabiting the place by defeating them in a deadly match of strip mahjong. Yeah, really.

The game is divided in two phases: adventure and mahjong. In the adventure part you move in the mansion by selecting each room on a map. You can also search a room and,... That's it. Your goal is to find and fight every girl to get to the end. Since there are only 7 girls for 6 mahjong battles (the devil girls Ivil and Evil are staying together), it feels pretty short. There's also a shop where you can buy healing and cheat items.
The mahjong part is competent. There's no popup to indicate if you can riichi or steal tiles (you need to open the menu), but otherwise it's not different from your modern mahjong video game interpretation. It's when you win that you'll see the true weirdness (and deviousness) of DR2NJ. You're presented with a simple choice: taking heath from your opponent, or turning points into money. Winning three hands is enough to defeat most girls (except for the much tougher final boss), but if you neglect to get money, you'll quickly regret it since it's the only way you can get items or even heal! You have a health bar, and it will decrease depending on how much "damage" (points) you get hit with. It means that small hands will remove half a heart, but a yakuman can outright one-shot you (just great). You don't get any health back between battles so you will absolutely want that money, but on the other hand trying to "milk" the enemy can be a recipe for disaster. My advice is to keep the money when you win really big hands, and deal damage with small one. It's a neat risk/reward system on paper, but it can be infuriating in practice and up the difficulty significantly.
DR2NJ is full of that kind of strange game design making the game feel amateurish. You can get super special skills to help you, but to learn them, you've got to check empty rooms several times without any hint. Those skills are not even that helpful considering they take a whole heart to use (your default health is only three hearts)!
There are three endings to the game, and every time you need to defeat the very difficult final boss. Since they all kinda suck, just go for the true end... Except, here come the twist, the true end is gated behind a number puzzle. Why? Why would you do this? Is this a mahjong game or fucking Layton? Just baffling stuff.

DR2 Night Janki is a late-era PC-98, and it looks as good as expected. I always felt than the cute character art in Leaf games didn't fit the erotic and sometimes violent content very well, but beyond that I've got no real issue. The highlight would be the music. You can even choose between a FM, MIDI, or CD soundtrack depending on your setup.

This is competent enough to not be considered kusoge, but it's clearly not a game worth playing even if you're a mahjong or Leaf fan.

This collection repackages nine small Flash escape games in a single one. While "Flash escape game" makes it sounds like a bunch of casual time-wasters, those are actually pretty decent point & click with multiple puzzles and even NPCs and contraptions to use. The quality of the games and puzzles can vary wildly (from genuine brain ticklers to sliding puzzle crap and moon logic), but they're mostly a very good time.

Another good point is the surrealistic setting, very much inspired by Twin Peaks. A bit too much even, since the story beginning with the death of a woman named Laura feels already too on the nose, but the detective named Dale? Come on.
It also makes a very liberal use of jump scares and grotesque violence, which won't be everyone's cup of tea (I personally thought it was in pretty poor taste).
At least those bird men are cool though.

Let's look at the games individually:
- Seasons: a good start to the series with a neat narrative and mechanical twist near the end.
- The Lake: extremely short and simple. Doesn't do much beyond its weird focus on fishing.
- Arles: a pretty good van Gogh-themed game. It doesn't fit well with the rest of the Rusty Lake story, but I enjoyed it a lot.
- Harvey's Box: a very literal take on the puzzle box theme. Sadly it doesn't do much beyond that, and the quality of the actual puzzles is nothing to write home about. My least favorite entry.
- Case 23: now this is the most ambitious game in the collection. It's longer, has multiple rooms and numerous puzzles, and tries to develop the story with the introduction of the detective protagonist Dale Vandermeer. Quality is sadly a little inconsistent though (I mean, this is the one with a sliding puzzle).
- The Mill: we're getting closer and closer to a "regular" point-and-click game here. You can move around and check inside every room in the titular mill (well, there are only three), and there's even a NPC you need to feed for some reason (I actually got stuck a while because of that). Not bad.
- Birthday: this one is more straightforward but has pretty interesting puzzles and a fun setting. Not fan of the random violence though.
- Theatre: very similar to Birthday with once again nice puzzles, a cool setting and very well-paced. One of my favorite despite the weird gore (but if it was your dream to literally dive inside one man's brain, here you go).
- The Cave: the last game of the collection. Pretty clearly divided in two parts: the first is a classic escape room in a rather drab-looking cave with puzzles of various quality (mostly on the mediocre/forgettable side), the second is spent under water inside a submarine. You need to move the small vessel manually by finding coordinates, using various control panels and solving simple puzzles along the way. I found it a nice change of pace, but I can see other players hating it since it's very repetitive.

Overall a decent collection of games, especially at a low price.

Well before their Elf All Stars Datsui Jan series, Elf released this mahjong game in the early 90s'. Developed during their RPG period and just before Doukyuusei, it has that distinct early PC-98 style that will immediately appeal to some people. Beyond that, it's a pretty basic game.

You play as a "professional" mahjong player. A sketchy job for a sketchy character since he starts the story pursued by the yakuza. Running away, he bumps into a poor office lady and to trick his pursuers, he kisses her to make them look like an unrelated couple. The girl obviously complains and gets caught by the two idiotic yakuza dudes who think she's his girlfriend. Meanwhile, our "hero" runs away and leaves town.
He comes back two years later, up to his usual shenanigans. The main character quickly learns of a new mahjong "dojo" that opened during his absence: a strip mahjong establishment where you pay a pretty substantial sum of money to get the chance of stripping down young women (and maybe more).
That's it, that's the story.
There are at least two issues you can see from the summary alone: first, the "plot" by itself is pretty dire; secondly, the main character is a completely idiotic asshat with no redeeming qualities whatsoever beyond knowing how to play mahjong.

Gameplay is more complex than your usual strip mahjong video game. You move your character on a small city map, reminding of the one in Doukyuusei in a much smaller scale. On that map, you can access various mahjong parlors, shops and hotels to replenish your health. Because, yes, you've got a health gauge, and also a "spirit" gauge. It looks a bit like a RPG at first, but the game system is actually very simple.
The main interest of Jan Jaka Jan is the actual mahjong. You have two types: one-on-one duel like in most strip mahjong games, and traditional 4 players game (it's a Japanese game, so it's all Japanese riichi mahjong, of course). The mahjong dojo duels have a special rule where you start at zero point and risk going home at the first defeat, but on the other hand, you only need to win three times to beat the girl. Mahjong gameplay is unsurprising. Sadly I found the difficulty very uneven and RNG-dependant, even for a luck game. You either roll over the opponents, or you get rolled yourself. Tense battles where every hand is important are rare, you're better off reloading the game until luck is on your side to win. Another issue is the "spirit" gauge mechanic: when you get hit directly (ron or tsumo, doesn't matter), you lose willpower. And the less willpower you have, the worst starting hands you get. So it can basically start a losing spiral (fun!). At least you can use items to heal (and there's also cheat items if that's your thing).
One final word (warning) on the mahjong: it's not a game for beginners. The reason is that the game will let you chombo. Press riichi by mistake? Be ready to eat a 8000 points penalty! If you don't know when to open your hand, or how furiten works, then don't bother with this game at all.
The general flow of the game is making money at the various parlors in town, then using this money to heal and to challenge the girls, repeat until you've beaten everyone. It's very simple and grindy. There's also story events along the way (you get your money stolen three times during the story, by the way) (yeah, more grind). Well, I guess, the main point is the mahjong anyway.

If you want to point a good reason to play this game, it's the beautiful art (I especially like the character designs of the four parlors owners). It also has a funny (but obvious) plot twist at the end (don't get me wrong, the story is still crap).
Overall, it's a barely above-average mahjong game.

A gorgeous 2.5D platformer with fantastic music, hailing from an era when Namco were at the top of their game.
Unlike your usual mascot platformer, Klonoa is not only charming, it also has great gameplay. No wonder, since it was created by Hideo Yoshizawa, director of the original NES Ninja Gaiden trilogy.
Klonoa uses his magical ring to grab his enemies, and to launch them in front of him, or directly under him for a double jump. Those simple mechanics give two faces to the gameplay: skill-based challenge with the use of double jump tricks (you can potentially stay in the air forever if you keep grabbing enemies), and puzzle-platforming (since it's a 2.5D game, you can also launch stuff to the background/foreground to activate switches and solve simple "puzzles").

It's not a perfect game (controls don't always feel precise, and you've got the usual 2.5D perspective issue at a few points), but it clearly deserves its reputation as a classic PS game.

Yeah, this is definitely an interesting sequel, for sure. It has all the elements of "that one game in the series", from being developed by another team than the original, to having wildly different gameplay and a very polarizing reputation among fans.

To begin with, it's the only real RPG in the series. You've got a very crude experience system, and a world map with towns, secrets and random encounters. It also introduces magic to the series, with MPs and an expensive list of spells you have to use constantly to get anywhere.
Another weirdness: Zelda II is an action-sidescroller. The first game was clearly inspired by the likes of Hydlide, this one is definitely unique, even compared to apparently similar games like Xanadu and Dragon Buster. Combat is a huge part of the game, since Miyamoto wanted to create a game focusing on blocking low and high with your shield (something inspired by Capcom's Trojan maybe?). As a result, don't expect the usual Zelda puzzles. Your enjoyment of the game will basically amount to how much you enjoy the fighting. Personally... I've got mixed feelings about it.

With the apparition of magic, items are less important, but they're still there. New ones are the glove, the hammer, the boots, and the cross. Most of them will appear again later in the series, so the introduction of towns and magic are not Zelda II's only addition to the franchise.

Well, to be honest, I hated that game.
It's tough as nails for all the wrong reasons, with random difficulty spikes all over the place (Death Mountain...). Fighting is tense, but unfair, with dumb hitboxes and input-reading enemies that changes their patterns constantly to take you off guard. It has a dumb lives system that forces you to restart at the same point on the map everytime you continue. It's weirdly grindy because once you die you lose all your current experience point so you're better off just killing the same couple enemies on the map to level up efficiently instead of doing it "the proper way". Dungeons are boring as sin.
I can see the appeal. If the fighting clicks with you, I bet Zelda II is a lot of fun. But sorry kids, a tough action-RPG with annoying backtracking and a punishing experience system? Back in my days we just called it Dark Souls (am I doing this right?).

It was interesting to play the original Dragon Knight III, since I tried the Knight of Xentar release a looooong time ago, and even back then as a horny teenager the writing was so painfully unfunny I quickly gave up.
This PC-98 version is way more interesting, and compared to the first two games, it does try a a lot of stuff. Does it hit all the right notes? Not really, but if you played I & II, you should try it anyway.

Dragon Knight is very connected to the previous games (which makes the choice to localize it especially bizarre). Soon after the events of DKII, Takeru is travelling in his brand new gear, brimming with confidence. That's when he gets jumped on by bandits who steal his armor and sword, leaving him naked. Worst, in his attempt to get his stuff back, he is tricked into drinking a potion that drains his strength back to level 1. Turns out, everything was a plot of demons, who seem to have it against him for some unknown reason. In order to clear everything up, Takeru will travel the world and party up with his friends Baan (from DKII) and Luna (from the first DK).

So yeah, the first thing to notice is that this is no longer a dungeon RPG. Dragon Knight III is a more traditional and ambitious game with a world map and various towns to visit. You'll even go back to familiar locations from the world of Dragon Knight like Strawberry Fields or the town of Phoenix.
The main issue is that the quality of gameplay doesn't really follow. If the first two games were already simple, this one is beyond simple. Combat is automatic and the dungeons very short. And while the game is technically decent (with beautiful CGs), the actual graphics are kinda dull. It has pretty poor diversity in environments, with most places ending up looking the same (a notable exception would be a Gigeresque-looking dungeon).
Even the story is pretty simple, even though it does provide a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.

As a sequel, Dragon Knight III works well. It expands the scale of the world and give fans plenty of easter eggs and small references to the two other games. They even do that thing that I always love, the "Dragon Quest victory lap", when you can travel around the world after beating the last boss to speak with NPCs. Sadly, on the pure game standpoint, it's very superficial and may disappoint after the excellent Dragon Knight II.

SNK got the pretty novel idea (at that time) of crossing over its two main fighting games, Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting, in one game. They eventually added characters from other games and created original ones, and that how KoF was born.
To accommodate the rather large roster (once again, at that time), fighting takes place as 3-on-3 team battles. No rounds, just beat every character one after another. You get a bit of life after every victory, so sweeping an entire team is not impossible if you know what you're doing.

Since it's a traditional SNK fighting game, you've got 4 buttons (light/heavy punch and light/heavy kick). Pressing the two heavy buttons makes you perform a "blow back" attack that will knock down your opponent. Pressing the two light buttons instead and you'll do an emergency evasion.
The game being based on both Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury, it borrows elements of those two games for its Super Special system. You can perform them like a Desperation Move in FF when your life bar is flashing, or use them when your special meter is full like in AoF. Of course, you can manually charge that special meter by pressing three buttons, and taunt to make your opponent lose meter.
Another gameplay element is the dash, wich gives precious additional mobility options to your character.

KoF 94' has 24 characters divided in 8 teams, plus one final boss. Like in many post-Street Fighter 2 fighting games, there is a world map and every team represents a country, despite it making barely any sense. Japan is the hero team, represented by three new original characters: Kyo, Benimaru, and Goro Daimon. Kyo Kusanagi is the game's protagonist and his slick character design will make him the popular face of the series. The Fatal Fury team gets the obvious trio of Terry, Andy and Joe, and represents Italy (referencing Andy's stage in FF2). Art of Fighting team gets three Kyokugen fighters with Ryo, Robert, and Takuma. They are sent to Mexico for some reason, which is weird since AoF3 also takes place in Mexico but that game was actually released two years later. Brazil has the Ikari Warrior team with Ralf, Clark, and new original character, Heidern. Athena and Kensou are also helped by a new character, drunken master Chin, and they form together the Psycho Soldier team (China). England is represented by the Women Fighters team with Yuri and King from AoF and Mai from FF (don't ask me why England) (well, actually, I just looked it up and it was supposed to be Billy Kane's team before he got replaced by Mai). Korea Team is composed of Kim from FF and two new characters, criminals called Chang and Choi (or "huge dude with iron ball" and "midget Freddy Krueger"). Last but not least, there's the hilarious US team, or "American Sports team", with boxer Heavy-D, basketball player Lucky Glauber, and football player Brian Battler. Those guys suck so much they inadvertently warp up as awesome (but yeah, they're basically joke characters stuck in a very cool roster).
Final boss is the iconic pain in the ass Rugal Bernstein, a character so broken that the Genocide Cutter sound bite will forever live in your head after playing (suffering) against him.

Visually, the game is a treat. SNK made the choice of slightly smaller but more detailled character sprites than usual. Add great character designs and extravagant backgrounds, and you've got an impressive showing for 1994.
This original KoF has obvious issues though. It's a very rigid game to control compared to the later installments (as if SNK motion inputs alone were not tough enough). Another problem is the absence of team edit. It doesn't bother me that much, but I know it's a deal breaker for some.
Also, a huge warning. If you can't find a poor soul to play a 30 years old obsolete fighting game with, you'll have to play against the CPU, and the difficulty is brutal. Better get your cheese strats ready, or at least put down the difficulty level to 1, otherwise you'll have a very bad time.

Not a bad fighting game, but a pretty forgettable one compared to its glorious sequels. Even if you are one of those "I play King of Fighters for the story" kind of guy (in that case, bravo, you get it), there's nothing much for you there. Oh well.

Once again directed by Masato Hiruta, Dragon Knight II is basically the first game but better, longer, and more ambitious.

To start, there's now an actual story.
The town of Phoenix was known for its mysterious evil-sealing metal. This led to the unwanted attention of two evil clans: the all-women Witch clan, and the all-men Dragon Knight clan (yeah, same dudes that got their ass kicked in the first game). Thankfully for the humans living there, they both hated each other and kept themselves in check, living in their respective towers. One day, all hell broke loose and the dragon knights attacked the witches: they waged war for three whole days. As a result the dragon knight tower was destroyed, both clans collapsed and their few survivors left the town.
Three hundred years later Takeru, still the main character, is on a mission. He lost a bet to a merchant named Baan and was tasked by him to deliver a mysterious book to the elder of Phoenix in his place. Once arrived, he realizes he got more than what he bargained for. A descendant of the witch clan called Mesaanya has settled in the old witch tower and is now terrorizing the town. Due to her hatred of the dragon knights and men in general, she forced all the young men to leave and forbid the young girls to fall in love. The elder is desperate since his daughter Kate has fallen in love with a boy from a neighboring town. The mysterious book is actually a monster-sealing scripture he hopes will be effective against Mesaanya. Unfortunately the witch appears in front of Takeru and the old man, steals the book, and announces that she has transformed every girl in town into monsters. At that point the only choice left for the hero is to climb up the witch tower, find the scripture, and rescue the girls himself.

Gameplay-wise, Dragon Knight II is similarly to the original, a simple dungeon crawler. There're a few basics, but welcomed additions though. You can now buy consumable items, even if it's only health medicine (Takeru can't use magic like in the first game, so it's not a bad investment). More importantly, you've got a party! You'll recruit the merchant Baan and a priest named Sophia to help you. Sadly they're not the most useful partners. While Sophia can use magic like healing or the incredibly handy "return" spell, Baan is kinda... there. You also need to buy equipment to keep his defense up, since you get a game over if ANY of your characters get killed (how rude). The most interesting thing about the party is the occasional banter you get while exploring, pretty unusual for a dungeon crawler. That dialogue makes the game feels way more lively.
At least the "gameplay loop" (urgh) is interesting and different. The monsters are all girls of the town transformed into various foes. You need to explore the tower to find pages of the scripture scattered all over the place. Once you've got a page, you can use it on the corresponding girl to dispell the curse. She'll then come back to her sense and return to town. So you're effectively cleaning up the tower from lower-level monsters one by one (which is quite elegant design for a porn game from 1990). Some girls will also reappear as NPC you can talk to after being saved (like the daughters of the weapon seller, or the weird girl that spend her time in the cemetery), which once again make the game feels more lively.
Oh, and since it's eroge, the rescued girls will also wait for you in your hotel room. Unlike in the previous game, Takeru finally get some (quite an understatement considering he bangs everyone in town). The sex scenes are short and lighthearted, even if it gets tedious towards the end considering the number of girls.

The monster girl concept does have its issues though. First, you can only fight one girl at a time, making the combat incredibly simple. Secondly, it means that there is no boss outside of the final one. Disappointing since fighting the dragon knights was a highlight of the previous game. And finally, once you release all the girls, you can't level up anymore (but it's not really an issue since you would have to be a massive dumbass to get stuck that way).

Even if it does have its problems (dull combat is not ideal for a dungeon crawler), Dragon Knight II is a game with interesting ideas and an appreciable amount of polish (for example, there's a different combat theme for each monster girl!). Nothing revolutionary, but a decent upgrade to the original.

When Tokuro Fujiwara and Yoshiki Okamoto started to develop the two first Capcom games, they divided their work like this: Fujiwara would make a shooting game (Vulgus), meanwhile Okamoto, the shmup specialist, would make a more traditional action game (Son Son). Turned out Okamoto couldn't help himself and Son Son is actually a very weird shooting game.

The game is obviously based on Journey to the West, with Son Son being Sun Wukong. It's a horizontal autoscroller where you use your magical staff to shoot the enemies appearing on screen. The screen is divided between six platforms, and you can jump up and down to change lane. Simple stuff, but quite fun!
My favorite thing about Son Son is how it incites the player to go for score. You can get points by killing enemies, of course, or by gathering various food items. There're also hidden bamboo shoots worth quite a number of points, and the POW bonus turning every bad guy on screen into food. It forces you to be more active in the way you play, deliberately going for some group of enemies or changing lanes to get items.

As all Okamoto arcade games, Son Son is viciously hard. Your attack has a puny range (another Okamoto staple), and the screen is quickly flooded with enemies past the easy first stages.
It's a fun arcade game on its own, and Capcom clearly has a fondness for it unlike with the forgotten Vulgus. Worth a look for fans of the company.

Before talking about Dragon Knight, let's talk about Elf a little.
Elf was founded by writer and designer Masato Hiruta, programmer Atsushi Kanao (also known for having another "legit" company called TamTam), and artist Toshihiro Abiru. It was originally an offshoot of another eroge developer, Fairytale (which was part of Kirara, which... yeah let's leave it at that, I'm getting a headache), best-known nowadays for cult classic Dead of the Brain. Elf started making games in late 1988, before gaining its full independence in 1989. The same year they released their first success Dragon Knight (here it is). They'll end up being the most important eroge company of the 90s', culminating with very well-received releases on Sega Saturn, before progressively fading into irrelevance in the mid 00s' and ultimately closing in 2015.

Dragon Knight came at an auspicious time. Dragon Quest mania was in full swing with the third episode breaking records, while the fantasy genre was exploding in anime/manga (the Lodoss novelizations, Dragon Magazine's creation, series like Bastard, Berserk, or Ozanari Dungeon,...) Since Japan was thirsting for fantasy, a computer RPG for adult made complete sense. And Dragon Knight was the first!
Actually, not really. It came four months after Alice Soft's Rance, and five months after Dragoon Armor, a game developed by Fairytale (hmm, what a coincidence). Oh well.

Story is simple. Young and brave adventurer Yamato Takeru stumbles upon the kingdom of Strawberry Fields (yeah, really). That land was blessed by a goddess until the evil dragon knights came to her tower, sealed her and stole six jewels of immense power (I know, the game is named after the bad guys, probably because it sounds cool). Recognized as the hero of a prophecy, Takeru is tasked by the queen to climb the tower, kick the dragon knights' ass, take the jewels back, and revive the goddess. Easy.
Also everyone in Strawberry Fields is a woman, for some reason.

This is a simple dungeon crawler, clearly inspired by Wizardry. Combat is incredibly basic, with only four options: fighting, offensive magic, health magic, and fleeing. No items beyond the equipment you can buy in town or the quest-related stuff you automatically pick-up. Most of the fun in the game is found in exploring and mapping (preferably with pen and paper for the original experience) the dungeons. You'll need to find and save various girls lost in the dungeon, who will then give you hints on puzzles or how to find the floor's boss (generally hidden behind a password). Some floors also have gimmicks, like the one where you need to disguise yourself as a monster, or the demon town.
If you can look pass the combat, it's a pretty good dungeon crawler for beginners. It's not very well-balanced, but grinding is also minimal if you take your time to explore, and gaining money and experience is pretty painless.

Let's finish with the erotic element: I found it surprisingly tame (or maybe I just have a dirty mind). There's a bunch of half-naked ladies put in dangerous situations, but no sex scenes. So it's still eroge but probably less lewd than your average European arthouse film.

Honestly not bad.

There has been a lot of misconceptions about the original Street Fighter. Like how Street Fighter II invented everything despite a lot of stuff already being in the first episode (six buttons control scheme, super moves, the "world warrior" setting,...), or how that game was a flop when it was actually pretty well-received in its time and even got a bunch of ports (well, you could say that the standards were not very high for fighting games back then).

Street Fighter is Takashi Nishiyama's ultimate evolution of the beat'em up, a genre he created with Kung Fu Master. It's basically a souped-up version of the boss fights in Kung Fu Master, a bunch of 1-on-1 duels against various martial artists. Fighting games at that time were closer to sport games than to the current craziness of the genre, with complicated (or sometimes too simple) controls and drab martial arts settings: a good example would be Technos' Karate Champ. On the other hand Street Fighter was created by Nishiyama and main designer Hiroshi Matsumoto as a colorful journey around the world to defeat characters practicing various styles of martial arts.
You control Ryu (or palette-swap Ken if you're player 2) and will need to beat 10 dudes in five different countries to get to be known as the strongest man in the world. In Japan, they are the monk Retsu and the ninja Geki (actually pretty annoying since he has a teleport and spams air projectiles like a poor man's Akuma). In the United States you fight the most boring guy in the history of Street Fighter, Joe, who is just a random shirtless dude, and boxer Mike who is totally not Mike Tyson, but also not the other guy from SFII who is also totally not Mike Tyson. China has the middle-aged Bajiquan fighter Lee, and old assassin Gen; while in the UK you'll challenge the gigantic punk Birdie and the bouncer Eagle and his two short sticks. Everything ends in Thailand where you'll fight Adon before confronting his master and last boss, the imposing (and tough) Muay Thai master Sagat.

Honestly the whole thing sounds pretty fun, but no need to look away from the truth here: Street Fighter is a bad game.
It was made in a short time and on a shoe-string budget (which explains why there's only one playing character) and the main programmer had never worked on a video game before that one. There was also the pressure-sensitive buttons gimmick that ended up getting scrapped when they realized people where destroying both their hands and the cabs. Nothing short of a production disaster.
Graphics are actually good with decent character sprites, and great-looking backgrounds. Sound on the other hand is grating, with some hilarious digitalized voices and a forgettable soundtrack. Of course the real issue is gameplay, with atrocious controls. Ryu (and Ken)'s iconic special moves are already there: the hadoken (projectile) and shoryuken (anti-air) that will become essential for so many characters. The tatsumaki senpukyaku doesn't move forward so it isn't as useful as in the later games. Sadly, because of the poor controls, they can be incredibly hard to pull off. You will need them though, since they are incredibly powerful. A hadoken to the face can remove more than one-third of the health, and if your shoryuken connects twice, it's 80% of your opponent's health gone! You sadly also take that level of damage from the CPU's special moves, so be careful (Sagat especially hits ridiculously hard). That means the strategy in Street Fighter is often simple: mash special moves and hope for the best. It's not the most elegant game design to say the least.

Street Fighter is a funny bad game, but still a bad game. That doesn't diminish its importance: it layed the foundations to the genre. Sadly for Street Fighter I's legacy, II took those foundations and built the video game equivalent of a cathedral over it.
What's important here is that despite its faults, there was a solid idea behind it. So it's not a surprise Nishiyama would try to solve all these issues in its followup: Fatal Fury (what else?).

In the early days of the Famicom, Nintendo was eager to sell their game console as more than just a toy, but as a real Computer for all the Family. There was Family BASIC for all your serious computer needs, Mahjong for dad, and of course edutainment for the young kids! In the end, that angle wasn't much of a success (except for good old Mahjong) and Nintendo's educational series was short-lived with only two games released (Donkey Kong Jr. Maths & Popeye no Eigo Asobi) and a third cancelled (Donkey Kong no Ongaku Asobi).

I don't think Nintendo had much faith in those things beyond "your kids can also learn maths and english on our video game console", since they're obviously half-assed: basically educational content slapped on well-known classic games.
In the case of Donkey Kong Jr., you do maths by... Grabbing vines? Yeah, there's not much meaning to it.

Surprisingly enough, the two main modes are multiplayers only (as if that thing wasn't niche enough). Time for you to compete with your friend in intense arithmetic battles, well, if you manage to convince a friend to play Donkey Kong Jr. Maths with you (spoiler: it's not going to happen).
Last mode at least is single player, but it's probably even less fun. You've got operations to solve, and you need to answer by... Grabbing vines. It controls quite horribly and any parent who forced their kids to do divisions and multiplications on that thing should have been charged for abuse. Also... Why not just use pen and paper instead? What's the point of it, seriously? Awful.

A curiosity, but not much worth a look even for fans of Nintendo oddities.

Like most arcades ports on the Famicom/NES, Trojan was reworked as a brand "new" game. However in that case, it's still pretty close to the original.
There's a few differences in level design (most notably a short water section in stage 2 or the removal of those godawful spider enemies) and even underground sections hiding power-ups. Overall the game feels easier and slower and the power-ups are very limited: the jump boots add something that was already present as contextual actions in the original (high jump), and the speed-up should have been your default speed. Feels like they removed stuff to put them back as hidden "features".
The most interesting thing about Trojan is probably the multiplayer mode: a 1-on-1 duel between two players (the first Capcom fighting game?).

Not a bad port, but pretty forgettable.

In 1983, Kenzo Tsujimoto founded Capcom after being forced out of his own previous company. That company was Irem.
Tsujimoto was a good businessman (pretty obvious when you look at where Capcom is 40 years later), and as a good businessman he did the obvious: scouting who he thought was Irem's best game designer for his new company. That man was Takashi Nishiyama.

Nishiyama's first game was the "golden age" classic Moon Patrol, but his next game was even more important: a Jackie Chan movie adaptation called Spartan X, and renamed Kung-Fu Master in the West. Kung-Fu Master is basically the origin of the beat'em up genre. You walk from right-to-left (and then left-to-right), beating the shit out of absolutely everyone who appears. And it's great! It's hard to think of a better video game concept (except maybe shooting things of course).
So, what about Trojan? Well, Trojan is basically a conceptual sequel to Kung-Fu Master. Except this time you're not playing a karateka dude (or Jackie Chan), but a warrior armed with a sword and a shield fighting his way through some sort of post-apocalyptic future (a very 80s' setting).
It seems a bit derivative at first, but in the sword and shield lay the true ambition of Trojan: it's a game about spacing and blocking. Like in Kung-Fu Master, when you're not mowing down legions of mooks you fight tense boss battles, usually one-on-one. At that point learning to use the block button and being wary of the bad guy's range is incredibly important.
Well, on paper. In execution, it doesn't work as well. Trojan is janky as hell. Crappy hitboxes, uneven difficulty, dumb strategies involving button mashing,... It's not good. It's not a completely terrible game, it can actually be a fun time-waster at times, but it doesn't realize its ambitions at all.

Looking back at Nishiyama's career as a whole, it wouldn't be fair to dismiss Trojan totally. It's not very interesting to play, but the building blocks for greater things were already there. It was still a long way to go though.

I always had a hard time with that game. I discovered the series with A Link to the Past, and going back to the NES episodes felt more like an ordeal than anything else.
Well, after several unsuccessful attempts in the last 15 years, I finally got to it and ended up beating the first Zelda game. Unsurprisingly, it's pretty good!

I think the most controversial thing about this game is how the overworld works. It gives you a lot of freedom and secrets to find, but on the flip side it can be easy to not know what to do or where to go without a guide. There's clearly a divide between players who like exploration and finding stuff on their own, and those that can't stand how "you're supposed to bomb every rock and burn every bush". In my case, I prefer a more linear and guided design, but I can still appreciate what the devs were trying to do and won't fault the game for such a choice.

My favorite part is the dungeons. While they don't have the gimmicks of the later Zelda games, they're still pretty fun. Fans of the series will feel in the comfort zone: there's combat encounters, "puzzles" (pushing the good block), keys to open locked doors, a map and a compass to find, and of course a boss to defeat.
Combat is a mixed bag. There are a decent number of enemies and tools to dispose of them, but Link isn't as nimble as in the later episodes. He can fire sword beams without any special weapon, but only at full health, and it's not always easy to stay that way. Some fights can become quite aggravating, especially those with stone statues shooting fireballs like in a danmaku game, or those terrible blue wizorbs. This is not a RPG, but you should still upgrade your character as much as possible (by finding heart containers, new swords, buying the magical shield, and finding the two rings that improve defense) to make your life easier.
Of course, since it's a Zelda game you can also find precious items in the dungeons. Some will be useful against certain bosses, other will make you progress on the map or in dungeons (acting as a sort of "key"). Most of them will be familiar since they also appear in other episodes. You've got the obvious ones like bombs, the bow (and its magical arrows you will need to find in the last dungeon to beat Gannon), the boomerang, the magical rod, the candle, the power bracelet (this one is actually hidden in the map and you can easily miss it like I did the first time), and weirder ones like the recorder (that will unveil secrets and warp you on the otherworld), a raft, the stepladder (used to step over shallow gaps), the book of magic (to make your rod stronger), and a magical key (which can unlock everything). You can also buy food (not for you thankfully, this is not Hydlide) and very useful potions. That's quite the inventory for a NES game!

Another feature of the original Legend of Zelda is the presence of a second quest. While it's an appreciable bonus as it makes the game twice as long, still I wouldn't call it a must-play. The second quest is harder for all wrong reasons. It's obtuse (I hope you like using the recorder on every single screen) and full of obnoxious stuff (I absolutely hate the red bubbles that "steal" your ability to use your sword). There is some interesting dungeon design, but as a whole I wouldn't recommend trying the second quest unless you're an absolute fan of the game.

The Legend of Zelda, I don't love it, but it's good. It does scratch a particular itch (nonlinear exploration) that other 2D games in the series don't touch. If you enjoy that sort of thing, or just want to see the beginning of the series by yourself, then go ahead and try it.