The Lynx’s gestation began at Epyx, a company better known for software, especially on the Commodore 64 in the mid-’80s. The machine eventually came to to market in 1989, after Atari had picked up the project – originally codenamed Handy – and renamed it. Funnily enough, it would remain a bone of contention that the development environment for the Lynx was based on the 16-bit Commodore Amiga computer – the direct competitor to Atari’s own comparable ST line of computers in the still-multiplatform home computer marketplace of the late ’80s and early ’90s before the PC’s performance and price levels caught up to became the de facto standard.

The Lynx was the first of what would become a succession of Game Boy competitors. Sega would eventually release the Game Gear and later the Nomad, and NEC the TurboExpress, a portable TurboGrafx-16, but these machines suffered similar flaws to those that plagued the Lynx as well as coming out far too late, years after the Game Boy had already established its dominance.

The redesigned Lynx II

The Lynx represented a completely different approach to handheld consoles than Nintendo’s all-conquering little machine. For a start, it was portable only in a technical sense, relatively speaking. Close to twice the size of the Game Boy, it also drained batteries far faster (making the AC adapter less of an optional extra and more of a necessity), and its backlit screen, while great in a dark environment, was near-useless in daylight. An optional sun-shield accessory was a less-than-ideal solution. Also, the system’s reliability and build quality was fairly poor. A redesigned Lynx that was often referred to unofficially as the Lynx II wasn’t too far behind the original, correcting several physical design flaws – for example, replacing the original’s bizarre side-opening cartridge hatch with a traditional cart slot, and finally offering stereo output through the headphone socket – as well as offering significantly better build quality and also slightly improving the atrocious battery life.

However, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Both variants of the Lynx offered a symmetrical horizontal layout with the option to flip over for left-handed use, connectivity between up to eight consoles (if you were lucky enough to know any other Lynx owners), a vibrant color display and – for the time – hugely powerful hardware. While the screen hasn’t aged well in the intervening two decades, the hardware has – it wasn’t until the Game Boy Advance launched in 2001, twelve years after the Lynx’s debut, that a more powerful handheld console was available. While its capability to do truly polygonal 3D visuals was limited, it could fudge 3D effects remarkably well due to its incredible sprite-handling abilities. Scaling and rotation of hundreds of sprites at once were its specialties, matched even in home consoles only by the advent of the SNES and Sega CD years later. Some games even used both sprite-scaling and polygonal 3D at the same time, often to great effect.

The result of this weirdly powerful but esoterically-designed hardware was a plethora of remarkably unique games, mostly by Atari and Epyx themselves – as is so often the case with ultimately failed consoles, third-party publisher and developer support was severely lacking, and by the time the plug was finally pulled, the Lynx had a relatively small library of available games. However, the flipside of this trait is that the system has a very small amount of shovelware in that library, and indeed it has a reasonable number of fantastic titles – including some great conversions of arcade titles of the era – that remain well worth playing even now.

Here’s just a few of my favorites:

Chip’s Challenge – One of the Lynx’s best games didn’t really take advantage of the system’s crazy hardware abilities much at all. Chip’s Challenge was a stage-based puzzle game, where you guide nerdy Chip through some of the most devious, evil and brain-melting traps you’ve ever come across. Yes, it’s a puzzler that will challenge (ho ho) your smarts as well as reaction times. It doesn’t look like much, but appearances can be deceptive.

S.T.U.N. Runner – Atari’s 1989 arcade tunnel-racer-cum-shoot-’em-up game was converted (I hesitate to use the rather inaccurate term ‘port’ in this bygone era of gaming) for virtually every noteworthy computer system under the sun, but every one was a dismal failure except the Lynx version. Even by the Lynx’s standards, the game’s re-working of the arcade classic’s blistering 3D visuals using sprite-scaling was a technical tour de force.

Xybots – One of the earliest examples of a co-operative shooter in a 3D environment, Xybots originally appeared in arcades in 1987. The Lynx version dispensed with the other versions’ split-screen layout in favor of utilizing the link cable, but was otherwise identical. Before 3D visuals evolved to the point where games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom became feasible, Xybots gave us a glimpse of where we were headed, and was a damn fine game in its own right. Bonus: the main characters have two of the best names in gaming history: Major Rock Hardy and Captain Ace Gunn.

Todd’s Adventures in Slime World – An almost Metroid-esque, side-scrolling shooty explore-’em-up, Slime World mixed up beautifully gooey graphics (it’s amazing what the Lynx’s graphics hardware can do with oozing, dripping snot) tons of secrets, solid action, a bunch of different modes and support for up to eight players both co-operatively and competitively to become one of the system’s classics. It even includes a zit-popping mini-game! Just what you’ve always wanted, I know.

Gates of Zendocon – This side-scrolling shoot-’em-up (we didn’t call them ’shmups’ back then) was less remarkable for its action as it was for its exploration. Its 51 levels could be explored in a non-linear fashion through the titular gates at the end – and sometimes in the middle – of whichever level you happened to be in at the time, and the visual diversity was so imaginitive that you’d always want to see where you’d end up next. Explosions that would literally fill the screen without a hint of slowdown were the icing on the cake.

Let’s start with Ikaruga itself. It’s a top-down scrolling shoot-’em-up of the very old school variety, as one would expect from developer Treasure, but with a couple of twists. After twenty-something years of learning to avoid all enemy fire in games of this ilk, Ikaruga actually expects you to unlearn this extremely base impulse. At the press of a button, you can change your ship from white to black and back again, and you’ll immediately notice that every enemy is based on one of these colors also – and their shots will match their color. The trick is that enemy fire the opposite color to you is lethal, but the same color is actually beneficial, charging up your only power-up weapon as you collect the energy of these shots. Also, you deal double damage to enemies the opposite color to you. The first couple of minutes of the game introduces this unique mechanic simply enough, but it’s not long before the game bombards you with both black and white at the same time; and after the first level it will demand of you very accurate and fast color-switching just to survive. In HD on the Xbox 360 the game’s visuals – 3D despite its 2D gameplay – look absolutely incredible, and it was pretty enough to begin with in its older incarnations in arcades and on the Dreamcast in Japan, and latterly on the Gamecube worldwide. It’s a savagely hard but extremely satisfying game that really puts an interesting spin on one of gaming’s oldest styles of gameplay.

Gradius V, on the PlayStation 2, is another example of an old-style 2D shoot-’em-up with 3D graphics, this time a side-scroller and part of one of the most storied and venerable franchises in that genre. Coincidentally, like Ikaruga, it was also developed by Treasure. Mechanically, though, it’s far more traditional – anyone who’s played any of the older Gradius games will be instantly at home with the game’s classic power-up system, where you get to pick and choose what to get as you go along with a mere button-press at the right time. Gradius V also is slightly more forgiving than its predecessors, allowing you to re-collect your Multiples (glowing indestructible orbs that follow your ship’s movement and mimic your shots for extra firepower) when you die. The Multiples – called Options in the Japanese release and older games in the series – also have an extra use determined by your choice of power-up array when you start the game or use a continue: they can be held in place, rotate their shots, be assigned a fixed formation, and more. The genius level design, which takes a lot of cues from its predecessors, makes all these variants useful if you keep a clear head, especially since your ship is always facing to the right but threats can come at you from any direction in some places. Gradius V is, again, an extremely hard game, but it plays fair; you initially start with three continues, and every hour you play, it unlocks another continue for you to use when you’re out of lives. When it hits 15, it unlocks free play, so you have unlimited continues. The level design is also so good that you never feel like the game’s actually being unfairly hard; you know that when you died, it’s because you screwed up, and you know how you could make it through next time; and make it through you will, progressing further and further into its ever more challenging levels. It’s a PS2-exclusive game so far, but hopefully it will come to one or more of the modern consoles’ download services eventually – its already beautiful graphics would look fantastic in HD. It also sports a phenomenal soundtrack that complements the action perfectly.

Unreal Tournament is a name known to most gamers with even a passing knowledge of first-person shooters. Originally a spin-off from Unreal, and released in late 1999 to compete with Quake III Arena, UT ditched the story mode completely and focused entirely on multiplayer. Okay, that’s not strictly true – it does have a rudimentary campaign that involves playing a series of matches with and against AI bots, but it’s totally optional since the only unlock is the character model of the final boss character. The bots, essentially NPCs or AI players, are actually one of UT’s standout features. Whereas many similar games – Quake III included – only ever seemed to ramp up the bots’ accuracy with guns as you turned their skill up, UT’s bots actually get smarter; varying their tactics, defending themselves more carefully, running different paths around the levels but never quite being infallible. Not far off human opponents, at least by the genre’s standards. And make no mistake, this is a game about sheer, unadulterated carnage. Throw out your tactical plans and cover mechanics, and warm up that twitch instinct. Looking back on UT, it’s amazing how well it’s aged. The first incarnation of the now-ubiquitous Unreal Engine, upgraded from the first Unreal game, is not only extremely efficient in its use of power (a 200MHz Pentium with no 3D acceleration at all can actually run the game quite playably, albeit in a low resolution, so rest assured it will run on almost literally anything – good news for netbook owners wanting to shoot stuff), but also scales well to look pretty decent even now, happily playing with any graphics hardware you can find at any resolution or aspect ratio with nary a hiccup. You won’t mistake it for Crysis, say, but it looks good; much credit is due to both its art style – the best Epic have ever had, in my opinion – and its pioneering use of translucent detail textures (enable them by delving into the hidden preferences menu, accessed by hitting the tilde key and typing “preferences” into the console) that can still put some modern games to shame. The action is perfectly tuned and absolutely relentless, the weapon selection is spectacular, the vast number of maps are also consistently brilliant (as seen by how often many have been revisited in subsequent UT games), the game modes are all great fun and can be heavily tweaked by a huge array of “mutators”, control is spot-on and there are a ton of mods and new maps to be had for free online that the game makes a snap to install. Whether you play it alone (with bots) or as it was truly intended with up to fifteen other people online or over a LAN, the original UT – on PC, not one of the watered-down console ports – still holds up as one of the greatest first-person shooters ever made, and still for me it remains Epic’s finest game.