Welcome to Virtual Boy Works! This brief journey through the entire worldwide library of Nintendo's least-beloved system begins here, with the Mario crew's first outing on the tennis court. It's a decent game whose flaws are outweighed by its strengths—a perfect example of the Virtual Boy itself, and a great example of this series' central premise: Virtual Boy may not have been a great system, but its library was better than most people realize.

Japanese publisher Taito makes its NES debut with a pair of games that, in stark contrast to the games that immediately precede them, quite faithfully recreate their arcade predecessors rather than reinvent them. That's not a bad thing, necessarily, but given the ambitious design of the games released on either side of this duo, it does cause Taito to feel a bit behind the curve. (They'll sort it out eventually.)

Young Kevin McAllister had it rough being stuck all by himself with a house full of crooks for Christmas, but really that was nothing compared to the suffering experienced by anyone who played his game. Home Alone leads into the final run of 1991 Super NES games, and... they aren't great.

Capcom continues its diligent efforts to overhaul its arcade games for NES with a revamp every bit as admirable as Tecmo's fresh take on Rygar. A liner 1985 corridor shooter becomes a complex space labyrinth demanding patience, persistence, and a willingness to plot out some complicated connections, in effect becoming an all-new game—one diminished in history by its close proximity to Nintendo's Metroid and an unfortunate decision by Capcom USA to remove the save feature present in the Japanese release.

The first of Nintendo's major releases for 1987 arrives, bringing with it some new technical innovations that will play a huge part in allowing U.S. releases for the system to maintain parity with titles that ran on pricey expansion hardware in Japan—and to go even further beyond that in the years to come. Oh, and the game itself is pretty good, too. Just be sure to take care when writing down those passwords...

A new third-party challenger has appeared! Tecmo arrives on NES with two simultaneous launches, both of which more or less fall into the puzzle-platformer genre. Solomon's Key and Mighty Bomb Jack are full of arcane secrets and high difficulty levels. Just the kind of thing a growing video game boy needs in his diet.

Future console first-party SNK makes its NES debut this week, and... well, let's just say there's room for improvement. Ikari Warriors was good and fun in the arcades, and on NES, it exists and doesn't cause your console to self-destruct. So that's something.

Also, a half-look at Bandai's first Power Pad title, Athletic World.

We looked at the original Castlevania for NES; now here is its Super NES remake. Sort of. Super Castlevania IV is kind of like a remix of Castlevania 1 and 3 (which does add up to IV!), but it makes some pretty big changes to the core mechanics of controlling Simon Belmont. On the other hand, it carries over a lot of elements from the NES, too. It's an odd duck in the Castlevania series that doesn't always work but has so much loving detail invested into it that it holds up regardless of its flaws.

Yeah, it's another Konami game... but not just any ol' Konami game. Castlevania is huge for both the publisher and the platform. A compact, challenging, six-stage adventure, Castlevania manages to be one of those rare works that nails its concepts on the first go. It may owe its basic concept to Ghosts ’N Goblins, but this adventure is so much more than its inspiration. The first NES third-party masterpiece.

Another double-header of sports-themed games, but this time the works under the microscope don't adhere quite so rigidly to genre standards. Instead, both Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball and Super Off-Road take more inventive approaches to their subjects in pursuit of fun... though one of these is definitely more successful in that objective than the other.