Nintendogs: Dalmatian and Friends

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! Wait, wrong story. Ho ho ho and a bottle of nog! It's a GamesRadar Christmas Carol!

TalkRadar and The GamesRadar Theatre Troupe invite you to put 'e's where they ought not to be and wrap yourself up in a warm Snuggie of Christmas cheer by way of the ghostly story of Ebenezer Scrooge. So put on your headphones, young listener, and sit back in your recliner by a crackling fire while we fill your chambers with the presence of three allegory-prone apparitions, the shriveled heart of a hardcore gamer, and his greatest fear of all - motion controls...

Before games made the jump to CDs and DVDs, most of our favorites were shelled inside plastic cartridges of varying size and shape. Color, however, was almost universal – all NES, SNES and Nintendo 64 games were in grey carts, while almost everything else (from Sega to Atari) were snuggled up in black. On rare occasion, random games would buck the trend, arriving in a unique color that leapt out of the conformity and grabbed your eyes by the balls.

If you weren’t around for those days, this entire feature probably seems a bit silly. But for those of us who remember seeing a gold Zelda or a red Doom, there was a special, intangible moment of joy in seeing something stick out from all the other games. Collected here are all the specially colored carts I could recall, beginning with the Atari 2600 and ending with today’s DVD case equivalents...

Mario is a cultural phenomenon. Final Fantasy is epic. Resident Evil, Fallout, Diablo... all of these classic franchises will eventually be tossed away, but they won't be stamped with expiration dates anytime in the foreseeable future.

Other franchises started growing mold before they even left the grocery store shelves.

The somehow-less-inspired franchises may sell millions, contain lovable