This bad boy was my first real handheld gaming system, and holy cow did I play the heck out of it! With the exception of one game that I lost, this is my entire collection, as it is today. Sadly, the Lynx itself is broken - I think some capacitors probably blew in it from using the wrong power chord... but I have some great memories of these games.
Out of all of these, the only one I didn't really enjoy was Bill & Tedd's Excellent Adventure... it was a little difficult when I was a kid and I couldn't figure out how to really get past the very first level.
Due to it being currently dead in the water, I don't have a way to record you guys any gameplay of these games, but World of Longplays on YouTube has a ton of these covered... so I'll be referencing them as I talk about my favorite games.
Cyberball, while having subjectively the coolest cover, was actually pretty dull. It was robot football, with all the control options you'd expect out of a game made in the 80s. I suppose if you were a big fan of football, you'd probably enjoy it well enough... but I'm not much of a sports guy so my basic method was to try random stuff until I scored or was bored.
Batman Returns was okay, but certainly wasn't one I played a lot of. It was a side-scrolling beat-em-up loosely based on the movie of the same name. For the time and style of game, it was okay. The gameplay was repetitive and the level design was pretty simplistic without a lot of work put into it... but you could beat the shit out of some uppity penguins, so it had that going for it at least. Bosses were just bags of hitpoints that were - to my mind as a young teen at least - purely designed to be a pain in the butt and make you frustrated. Most had repetitive mechanics that were relatively easy to avoid, so it was just a chore to get through their large health pools.
Gauntlet on the other hand was one that I put a TON of time into.
Todd's Adventures in Slime World was another title that I found to be a little underwhelming at the time. It was a side-scrolling platformer featuring a fairly slow-moving sprite. It was probably better than I give it credit for, but I sucked at it and at my best I think only made it past the second level... so my own suckage at it is probably colouring my opinion. I don't remember the objective of the game, but there was a lot of collecting and shooting and jumping around in slime. You can check out a youtube vid of it if you're interested in seeing more of the gameplay first-hand.
I won't go over every game I own, as I didn't put a lot of time into Xybots, Toke, or Viking Child. They were okay, and I would play them a bit at a time, but they weren't ones I was super into and I don't have strong memories of them. I will, however, end on the last really strong game that I played a lot of:
Xenophobe.
God DAMN I loved this game. This was my shining star, and is the jewel of my collection. It had, in my opinion, the best graphics of the Lynx games I own and - while the controls took some getting used to - was the one game I was the best at.
This bad-ass game had 9 playable characters, which was freaking awesome to me at the time, and the art for each of them was fabulous. The game itself is a basic side-scroller, and your objective is to clear out various ships/star-bases/etc of alien infestation. I'm pretty sure this is not directly related to the Aliens franchise - but it definitely leaned heavily on it for inspiration. I mean, even the box art has a hugely H. R. Giger feel to it. It's my personal opinion that the game was designed with the intent of being juuuuust shy of copyright issues and riding the coat-tails of the success of Alien/Aliens, given that it released in 1987 just one year after Aliens (which released in 1986).
Anyhow, back to the game itself. Beyond just ridding levels of alien infestation (which came in a variety of types), you would get extra points at the end of each level for the various items you picked up along the way. Salvage, your health pool, and some other various things all helped towards your high score.
You can also get a couple types of guns, some bombs, and a jetpack... so it really had a pretty impressive depth of options for a game made in 1987. If you want to check out a long play of it, this is from the World of Longplays YouTube account.
It's truly a shame that the Atari Lynx didn't last, given how far ahead of it's competition it was. Gameboy didn't even have freaking colour until the late 90s, and even when they did, it was way lower quality.
I definitely had a lot of fun with this system, and pulling it out of storage to catalog what I had was a lot of fun.
Hope you've all had a great day.
