Dr. Mario

This is the best two-player head-to-head competition game ever. It falls into the lovely category of "quick to learn, FOREVER to master", like so many of my favorites. The game styles can vary from beginner-level and slow-going, to an insane flurry of combos, each packed with classic sound effects. The basic premise of this Tetris-style game is that a doctor with Mario's face is tossing random two-tone capsules, one at a time, into a huge bottle, and you have to make sure the bottle never fills up, by use of the physical truth that if four like-colored squares line up vertically or horizontally, they disappear into a drug oblivion. In addition, the bottle comes pre-packed with a number of similarly colored "viruses", and your end objective is to either A: eradicate all viruses from your bottle, or B: drop enough trash into your opponent's bottle that his bottle fills up and you win by default. That's where the heart of the game comes in. To drop trash into your opponent's bottle, you have to make combos, that is, where two or more chains of 4 disappear into a drug oblivion, on the same move. With a lot of practice, 3x, 4x, and 5x combos becomes something of a second nature. This is the kind of game that will occupy your thoughts while you're driving, sitting through class, or on a boring date. You can probably get an NES and a copy of Dr. Mario for under $50 total, and trust me it's worth far more than any $50 multiplayer game you can buy for your trash 3D consoles.