Joe & Mac is a Super Nintendo port of the Data East arcade platformer Caveman Ninja. There's nothing "ninja" about the game, but the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles craze in the early 90's made the word ninja  very popular, so marketing people just slapped it on anything. Joe & Mac is the poster child of a "rental game," meaning a game you should rent rather than buy. The titular Joe and Mac aren't ninjas, but a couple wild and crazy cave-guys. They boast green and blue hair, respectively, yet unexpectedly for cavemen are clean-shaven. You can play solo or two-player. There are three difficulty settings. And let's not forget that you can choose between stereo and monaural sound! Joe and Mac have several moves at their disposal. Besides the usual jumping, they can do a higher rolling jump if you hold ↑ when you press X or Y. They can also somersault through enemies by double tapping → or ←. They can catch a ride atop pterodactyls and other enemie...

BurgerTime is another classic arcade game that already looked dated when it hit the NES in 1987. I played BurgerTime on a PC a few times when I was a kid, and it seemed primitive even then. Still, it's fun in a challenging kind of way. In BurgerTime you control a tiny chef named Peter Pepper, who is constructing hamburgers that dwarf him, all the while avoiding anthropomorphic food adversaries. They have very creative names: Mr. Egg, Mr. Pickle, and Mr. Hot Dog—whose small size suggests he's actually a cocktail wiener. Peter doesn't cook the burgers; he only assembles them by causing the buns, patty, and lettuce to fall into place. The components are vertically aligned, but on different levels. When he walks across one, it falls down one platform, which also crushes any enemies below it. If an enemy is on  the falling item at the time, it falls an additional platform and destroys the enemy. This is such a great advantage that it forms the most critical element of strategy....

Karate Champ on the Evercade handheld Karate Champ is a port of a 1984 fighting arcade game by Technōs. On the arcade, Karate Champ used a unique two-joystick control system that required different combinations of movements for different attacks. On the NES, however, the A and B buttons had to substitute for the second joystick. Unfortunately, the combinations are not intuitive and are hard to remember. For example, while A throws a reverse punch, if you press it while holding → or ←, you get a kick instead. To do the low punch (the only other punch), you have to press A and B together while holding ↓. Yet normally A and B together give you a roundhouse kick! And there are more combinations. It's necessary to consult a chart while playing, because the whole thing feels very random. The bad controls are made even worse by the baffling hit detection, which causes most apparent hits not to count. The game mimics a karate match, meaning it's point based. Every clean hit should (but...