RPGs don’t have to be deep or dramatic or dark. Sometimes they can just be lighthearted, enjoyable adventures. Ten years ago, Overworks (Now Sega Wow) a perfect example of this type of RPG. Skies of Arcadia was the ultimate “popcorn” RPG. It was colorful, fun, and didn’t take itself too seriously. It’s often forgotten against the much more serious (and, to be frank, better written) RPGs of the past, but it’s simply fun, and that’s something you don’t see enough these days.

You play Vyse, a young pirate-with-a-heart-of-gold in a world of floating continents and airships. You and your childhood friend Aika go on an adventure with a magical priestess, a burly robot-armed whale hunter, a naive prince, and a dashing buccaneer. It’s the standard story of help-the-mysterious-girl, collect-the-magical-macguffins, save-the-world-from-the-evil-empire, and it works great. It’s not complicated, it doesn’t throw twists of betrayal and devastation your way, it simply follows a proven formula and has fun doing it.

Instead of delving into the depths of 8-bit consoles and DOS-era PC games, this week we’re hopping back a mere six years, to 2004. The game is Troika’s Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, a brilliant first-person RPG that lets players experience Vampire: The Masquerade first-hand, through Deus Ex-style RPG and action elements.

Like most good stories involving soulless bloodsuckers, Bloodlines takes place in Los Angeles. You’re a freshly transformed vampire dropped into the middle of undead intrigue revolving around the discovery of a sarcophagus that could contain one of the oldest and most powerful vampires in the world. Like all good Vampire: The Masquerade campaigns, Bloodlines’ story is moody, bleak, and violent.

The action is very similar to Deus Ex. Stealth and strategy is highly rewarded, and if you try to fight through everything with guns blazing you’ll quickly be torn to little vampire bits. There’s a huge selection of guns and melee weapons, and a skill system lets you decide just how you want to play through the game. The system is based directly on Vampire: The Masquerade, and you can get different traits and abilities depending on the clan you choose. You can magically drain blood from victims as a Tremere, become invisible as a Malkavian, or summon animals as a Gangrel.

This week, we’ll look back at not a single game, but an entire sub-sub-genre that defied all expectations and shaped so many of our youthful gaming experiences. It has always been the case that if a video game is based on a popular franchise, it’s probably going to suck. It was true in the days of the Atari 2600 and it’s true today. It was especially true in the NES days, when nearly every 8-bit video game based on a popular movie or TV show turned out to be a nigh-unplayable, weekend-ruining piece of crap.

And then Capcom started to make Disney games. And they were freaking awesome. Well, three to five of them were awesome, and that’s a record that hasn’t been broken since.

This is one of the most depressingly awesome examples of a generational sleeper hit. Like Kid Icarus, StarTropics was a fantastic NES game with outstanding gameplay, level design, and challenge, and it was roundly beloved by all who played it. Also like Kid Icarus, it saw a single, relatively disappointing sequel and then faded into total obscurity. It’s a slightly even more obscure game, because StarTropics didn’t even get a Nintendo history shout-out in Super Smash Bros. Melee or Brawl.

StarTropics was basically The Legend of Zelda with a tropical flair. Instead of Link, an elf with a sword looking for the Triforce and Zelda, you’re Mike Jones, a teenager with a yo-yo looking for three magic cubes and his uncle. You still wander around an overworld, manifested as a linear string of tropical islands rather than the big wilderness of Hyrule. You still delve deep into dungeons, solving puzzles and killing bosses. You even keep track of your health with tiny hearts representing your hit points.

The game actually eclipsed Zelda in a few areas, which isn’t too big a surprise considering it came out four years later. The graphics were much better, the puzzles were much more challenging, and Mike could actually jump around, which added a new level of depth to both combat and puzzle-solving. You didn’t get as many tools through the game, and you couldn’t explore as much as in Zelda, but otherwise StarTropics was every bit as much a stellar example of the action-adventure genre.

Oh, yeah. This is the good stuff. One of the best games in a now-dead genre, in a now-sucks franchise. TIE Fighter truly hails back to the bygone days of awesome.

TIE Fighter remains one of the best examples of the space-based shooter. Fly around the galaxy, shooting rebels and pirates in a freaking TIE Fighter (or several variants, including the ridiculously overpowered and awesome TIE Defender). Remember when you used to own a joystick? This game is why you used to own a joystick.

This game was fun. You got to play one of the “bad guys” in Star Wars (who, of course, had the cooler ships), and fly through multiple tours of duty, all while uncovering secret missions, rising up in rank, and earning medals for your accomplishments. You could even join the Emperor’s secret society and get branded with badass glowing tattoos for serving him.

Take the annoying red demon from Capcom’s Ghosts & Goblins (and Gargoyle’s Quest) games, add a healthy serving of Metroid, sprinkle in some Ninja Gaiden, and you get Demon’s Crest for the Super Nintendo.

Demon’s Crest is actually the third game in the sub-series, after the aforementioned Gargoyle’s Quest and Gargoyle’s Quest 2 on the NES. Like the first two games, you play Firebrand, fighting his way through a demonic world that consists of side-scrolling action levels joined together by an overworld map. The game shares some of the RPG elements of the Gargoyle’s Quest games, but much more streamlined and engaging.

This week’s flashback is a seldom-remembered game in the biggest franchise in video game history: Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins for the Game Boy. This is probably the only great unsung Mario game. Every other excellent Mario game is beloved, whether it’s the first Super Mario Bros., Mario 3, Super Mario World, Mario 64, or even  Yoshi’s Island. No one remembers Mario Land 2, even though it was probably the best non-remake, actually-starring-Mario Mario game on a portable system until New Super Mario Bros. came out a few years ago.

Terranigma is the best Super Nintendo game you’ve never played. It’s a truly curious title, because it’s one of the few great games that came out in Europe, but never hit stores in America. Even though it never saw this side of the pond outside of importers, it’s easily one of my favorite Super Nintendo games (and considering the massive list it has to compete against, that’s a truly impressive feat).

The game was developed by Quintet, the company behind the excellent Illusion of Gaia and the underrated Soul Blazer adventure games on the Super Nintendo. In fact, Terranigma is essentially a sequel to Illusion of Gaia, and all three games are basically part of the same series. They aren’t direct, story-based sequels, but they do share the same underlying themes of awakening and rebirth, and the concept of “Gaia.” (Fun fact: the first boss in Soul Blazer is a bonus boss in Illusion of Gaia). They also have similar gameplay mechanics, with Legend of Zelda-style action and puzzle solving.

I hope you’re ready for some gaming nostalgia, because it’s Friday Flashback time. In this inaugural episode, we’ll look at a DOS-era action game from Origin that’s near and dear to my heart: 1995′s Crusader: No Remorse.

Crusader: No Remorse was an isometric action game where you play as the ridiculously badass red Boba Fett-looking guy on the cover, a corporate supersoldier known as a Silencer (not a crusader, a textbook example of I Am Not Shazam). Like so many other video games, you’re quickly betrayed, left for dead, realize you were working on the wrong side, and join a ragtag bunch of resistance fighters dedicated to taking down the evil empire/corporation. A few hilarious, Night Trap-bad FMV scenes later and you’re fighting the very guys you were working for, blowing up their warehouses, factories, and office buildings. It’s adorably pre-9/11.