Nintendo Video Games Bucket List

Collect Power Moons across kingdoms

The 2006 DS game that brought back 2D Mario after fifteen years, and sold thirty million copies doing it.

The 1989 Game Boy launch platformer: twelve levels, two shoot-em-up stages and a princess who is not Peach.

Two generations across a continent, with children who inherit their parents’ skills and weapons.

The first 3D Mario built around linear levels and a goal pole, in stereoscopic depth on the 3DS.

A crashed colony ship on the alien Mira, an open world four times the size of the others, and mechs to cross it.

The 2023 game that summons the heroes of every earlier Fire Emblem as rings you equip.

Build the levels instead: five art styles, a story mode of a hundred courses and endless uploads from everyone else.

Ike’s mercenary company in a war between humans and laguz; the GameCube entry the series is still writing about.

The GameCube launch game: the trench run, the Battle of Hoth and gold medals nobody could reach.

The real Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2: the same engine, poison mushrooms and wind, and far harder.

Team Ninja give Samus a voice and a chain of command; the entry the series argues about.

Samus stranded on Viewros with a psychic link to her ship; Retro Studios after an eight-year restart.

Samus sent to exterminate the Metroids on their home planet, on a Game Boy screen with no map.

MercurySteam rebuild Metroid II on the 3DS, with a melee counter that changes every encounter.

Four marines in mechs instead of Samus; the co-op spin-off announced to an audibly unhappy room.

A first-person Metroid on the DS, aimed with the stylus, with six rival hunters chasing the same relics.

The other half of the linked pair, with a harp that moves Link between two eras of the same island.

Pre-rendered apes on a SNES in 1994, mine carts and a David Wise soundtrack that still gets remixed.

Kalos, the first three-dimensional generation, and mega evolution in the middle of a battle.

The same story from the other side, with a save file imported from the first game to finish it.

Diddy and Dixie through Kaptain K. Rool's pirate world; the hardest and best of the Rare trilogy.

Zelda herself, copying objects and monsters to solve everything.