Over 8 million people purchased Halo 3. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas sold a whopping 12 million. And Nintendo can’t defecate out Pokémon and “Wii Insert Random Thing To Do Here” games fast enough to completely satisfy the masses. But with all these amazing successes, there have been numerous games and even complete series that have fallen to the wayside. Remember: for every Super Mario Bros., there’s a Shutokou Battle 2: Drift King Keichii Tsuchiya & Masaaki Bandoh. As a proud gamer, I feel that it is my privilege—nay, my duty—to take some time and offer a brief glimpse at many of the games that disappeared into bargain bins and trash bins alike due to overshadowing from more prominent titles, as well as titles that will forever remain sequestered within one region of the world. You’d better be prepared to be educated a little, because there is much that you haven’t seen.

JULY 2010: Pac-Boy & Mouse

ALL RIGHT, MR. JEFF, WHAT SPECIALTY DO YOU HAVE THIS MONTH? A RARE LOUSY PLATFORMER STRAIGHT FROM JAPAN WITH QUIRKY CHARACTERS TOO UNUSUAL FOR AMERICAN AUDIENCES, I’LL BET.

You cheeky devil, you! I think what you need is a bit of supervision!

SUPERVISION? I’M A GROWN FICTIONAL NARRATOR! I DON’T NEED SUPERVISION! GIVE ME ONE GOOD REASON WHY I NEED SUPERVISION!

You’ll definitely need it to play this month’s obscure title.

I DON’T GET IT…

OK, OK, I’ll come out with it. You’ll need supervision, all right. The Watara SuperVision handheld console, that is.

WATARA SUPERVISION? WHAT THE HELL? I DIDN’T SEE THAT ONE IN MY LOCAL TOYS’R’US GROWING UP.

And rightfully so. I’ve gone one step further this month and chosen a game that isn’t even on a console that anybody could remember! The Watara SuperVision (or as the crazy British like to call it, the Quickshot SuperVision) was a handheld console similar to a Game Boy that came out in 1992 courtesy of—you guessed it—Watara. Never heard of Watara? Damn straight you haven’t. And heck, some models even looked eerily similar to the Game Boy with a directional pad, two round buttons in the same vein labeled A and B, and two other more rectangular ones which donned the terms Start and Select. I wonder where they got the inspiration for THAT!

IT LOOKS LIKE THE GAME BOY, AND IT PROBABLY WAS RATHER SIMILAR IN THE GAMES IT OFFERED. SO WHY WASN’T IT A SUCCESS?

It may have looked like a Game Boy, but the games were far lousier. Most of them came right from Taiwanese developers—and we all know how great of an impact Taiwan has had on the gaming scene…well, maybe the pirated scene. With most third-party developers already pledging allegiance to Nintendo and their gray brick from Heaven, the Watara Supervision was doomed to obscurity. But a total of 65 games are supposedly known to exist, which shows that there was some support for it. And technically, it WAS available in the U.S. and Canada for a very limited time…does anyone remember K-Mart in Canada? But anyway, overall, I’m not here to talk fully about the SuperVision. I’m here to talk about Pac-Boy & Mouse, a game for that system. You can already tell that the game is poor just by the name alone.

PAC-BOY? IS THIS A RIPOFF OF PAC-MAN?

On the contrary, it’s much worse. Just look at the screenshots and you’ll see that there isn’t really much to say about this dismal title. Heck, you can barely find any knowledgeable source of information on this game, it’s so lost in the bowels of time. But what I gathered from the awful introduction is that a mouse has been beating up your girlfriend and now you, in your fit of rage, are solely devoted to avenging her by squashing all mice. Each single-screened level requires you to run around in a maze of blocks that you can push around and/or make disappear, and you need to push those blocks and squash all the mice running around in a seemingly random pattern. Mindless fun for about two minutes until you realize that the game is boring and the graphics are as exciting as squirrel constipation.

WELL, I MIGHT JUST HIT UP E-BAY AND FIND THIS GEM!

Hey! Don’t you dare go looking for this “gem”! I’d more strongly recommend eating, digesting, and passing a cardboard box than snagging this up.

RELAX, DUDE. HMMM…MAYBE WE SHOULD PLAY MORE WATARA SUPERVISION GAMES IN THE FUTURE.

Maybe. I just hope Pac-Boy & Mouse wasn’t the best of the bunch.