Frogacuda

This is the correct answer. Electrocop is also very involved.

Not well, though I actually liked Steel Talons and Hard Drivin at the time but the framerate is unplayable now. Warbirds was only ever good 2-player. Battlezone is probably the best game to throw around real polygons on the system, methinks.

Im pretty sure that the lynx has a 6502 (which is 8 bit)... Gee, no kidding. The graphics chip was 16 bit, and that's what was pushing those sprites around. Stop busting balls, you know as well as I that it was advertised as a 16-bit system and the unique graphics chip was a major selling point.

It was such a hard list to narrow down. I arbitrarily drew the line at 20 games in the interest of keeping the length readable, but there were plenty more I would have liked to mention. I love my Lynx.

Yeah, I miss the old days of Craig's "handheld" channel. Now he's kind of been relegated to DS, working under the Nintendo channel leadership (just as the PSP is under the leadership of the PlayStation channel, etc). Craig still does a great job, but he's got a narrower scope to work with. I really love writing stuff for Retro because it's such a broad topic. Anyway, the article's up: http://retro.ign.com/articles/865/865505p1.html

It really is the best possible adaptation the hardware could allow, and IMO the best platformer on the system. I don't know that it's as good as the Amiga original, but it's certainly done justice at the very least.

CyberVirus was a neat little game. I featured it in an article that should be going up on IGN in the next couple days.

I bought all three of them in the vain hopes that each next one would illuminate the previous, but alas they were all obtuse pieces of crap.

I honestly liked CyberVirus more. Battlewheels is pretty rockin on the rare occasion you have people to play multi with, but CyberVirus is a much more developed, more involving single player experience. One of my fave Lynx games.

Defender is a shooter, though, not a platformer. And yeah, in my article I names Space Panic as a relevant precursor to the platform game, but not a platform game itself.

Bumping this old thread to get some help for a project I've adopted. I've almost completely rewritten the wiki on Platform Games (kept about 3 paragraphs of the old one; it was really bad), and I could use some expert opinions in tightening it up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_game A lot of these firsts aren't well recognized or well documented (most sites that reference these firsts incorrectly mention later Nintendo games). The first scrolling platformer and first 3D platformer mentions are just my best guesses based on the fact that they are years earlier than anything else I can think of. I'm also curious if anyone knows more specific dates for the release of Donkey Kong and Jump Bug, as I really wonder which was first.