I don't know what to make of this. It has to be some kind of trick.
Yeah, a trick. Like, you download River City Ransom, start it up, and surprise! It's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the NES. Or Total Recall. Or the unreleased sequel to Urban Champion.
No, I refuse to believe that the Nintendo who brought us Cruis'n USA and King's Knight is giving us River City Ransom (NES, 500 Points), a brilliant and infinitely replayable cooperative brawler-RPG. Phantasy Star III (Genesis, 800 Points) sounds more like the kind of thing they'd do to us, on the other hand. But...River City Ransom? No way.
Is this a new beginning for the Virtual Console? Or will next week bring Cheetahmen II and a translated version of Law of the West? Only the cruel geniuses at Nintendo know for sure.
One of the great things about the Virtual Console is that, for many systems, it offers a cheaper and convenient alternative to buying games second-hand than getting loose cartridges second-hand. The collector market has driven up second-hand prices for virtually all old games, and especially for games from popular systems like the Nintendo hardware.
Ebay watching site GameSniped recently reported that the first games graded and slabbed by the VGA - Video Game Authority, that is - have shown up for auction on e-bay, and are fetching unusually high prices thanks to their pristine state. By "slabbed", I mean complete, sealed-in-box copies of the games are placed inside a plastic case that's designed to show any signs of tampering and make the product harder to damage.
Sorry I left you hanging, guys. For weeks, you've sat in front of your computers -- sleeping in your chairs, ignoring basic hygiene, forcing loved ones to feed you blended cheeseburgers through a tube -- while you've done nothing but refresh OMG Nintendo as you thought to yourselves, "Oh man, Cruis'n USA looks SO AWESOME! But...but what does Sardius think?"
Well, I'm glad you waited. I'm about to cover everything released on the Virtual Console over the last three weeks, and it's not going to be pretty. I mean, just look at that shot from Mega Turrican up there. Eeugh.
Hello friends. How do you feel about shooters? There's about a million of them on the Virtual Console right now. From games where you walk and shoot things to games where you fly and shoot things, Nintendo has you covered. Luckily, this week sees one new release of each! Fantastic. It brings to mind that one scene in The Blues Brothers when the lady at Bob's Country Bunker tells Elwood that they have both kinds of music, country AND western.
Anyway. Fantasy Zone (500 Points, SMS) is a fondly remembered horizontal shooter that by all means SHOULD have been the Sega Master System's Virtual Console debut, while Mega Turrican (800 Points, Genesis) continues the VC's fine tradition of continuing to offer run-and-shoot games that aren't the original Contra.
And yeah, I've kind of fallen behind on my reviewing duties, sorry. I'm thinking of making an all-in-one update covering all of those VC games that nobody's been buying over the last few weeks. Some kind of "roundup," I guess you could call it. Yeah, that's the ticket.
"The arrival of April means springtime fun is officially back in season," Nintendo says in its latest Virtual Console press release, vaguely blaming months and months of lame Virtual Console releases on the winter season. All this time, Nintendo was simply suffering from seasonal depression, and nobody picked up on it. You have to be aware of these things, guys. Depressed people don't just come right out and tell you that they're depressed. I mean, King's Knight? Cruis'n USA? Obvious cries for help. All Nintendo wanted was enough money from Virtual Console sales to buy a sun lamp for itself during the gray winter months, and you ignored their needs with pessimism and negative VC reviews. I hope you're all happy with yourselves.
Luckily, Nintendo's feeling better now. Not well enough to offer anything truly outstanding, but it's not like YOU deserve it, jerk. Up first this week is Bases Loaded (NES, 500 Points), the best damn baseball game ever made, up until the release of MLB Power Pros. We're also getting Yoshi's Cookie (NES, 500 Points), an underrated puzzler with a great multiplayer mode. Reviews to follow, with bonuses!
A new classic console has been added to the Wii's Virtual Console lineup! Unfortunately, it's the Sega Master System. Wah wah waaaaaah.
Just kidding, I love the Master System. Phantasy Star was so far ahead of its time that it took people about 20 years or so to notice. And the Alex Kidd series was decent, for its time. And...uh, Gangster Town was pretty...good, I guess?
Anyway, with so many iconic games to choose from in order to best represent Sega's 8-bit console, there can obviously be no better way to kick off the Master System's Wii debut than with Wonder Boy (SMS, 500 Points), a game already available one and a half times over on the Virtual Console as the identical Hudson's Adventure Island and its remake, New Adventure Island. But wait! As a bonus, we're also getting the family restaurant favorite Cruis'n USA (N64, 1,000 Points), which you may remember as that one terrible racing game that provides a brief but appreciated escape from the greasy pizza and greasier children at Cici's Pizza. Except now you're paying an extra $9.75 for an inferior version of it. Virtual Console, woo!
Select Button unleashed sheer joy on the gaming internet when it pointed out YouTube user iniche's collection of videos from bizarre bootleg possibly Chinese Contra games.
Now, I'll freely admit I don't like Contra as much as I should. I never had copies of the games or a friend with them, and there was always something dauntingly manly about the games. That said, I don't think any gamer who's not a total jerk lacks respect for the sheer skill a Contra game demands, and the sheer visual panache that rewards a skillful player.
The fact that these hilarious bootleg Contras lack basically every good thing about Konami's classic Contra titles is what makes them so endearing. That, and the mysterious hitboxes, and the Engrish, and... oh god. Look, just go watch the videos. My personal favorite is the run-through of Super Contra X, because as the Contra Dude flies, so does my heart.
J.C. Fletcher at Engadget's Wii Fanboy has written up a ragingly awesome look at the old NES title Dragon Power. It's actually based on Akira Toriyama's now-ubiquitous Dragonball franchise. At the time, Bandai decided it was the adventures of Goku and Nora on a trip to find Crystalballs.
Bandai's effort to de-Japanify the game backfired spectacularly. Dragon Power makes absolutely no sense in its current form. At least had it been a Dragon Ball game it would have had a chance of a story, even if it was a story from some unknown Japanese comic. As it is, the dialogue, locations, objectives, and even items... are totally inscrutable most of the time.
This is must-read stuff because the practice of localizing games based on licenses by removing the license was surprisingly common back in the day. Did you play U.N. Squadron for the SNES? Actually an Area 88 game. The TG-16 pack-in title, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones? Based on Sunrise's crazy kids show Majin Eiyuuden Wataru. That's just off the top of my head; I'm sure there's more.
Nintendo describes Powerball as a futuristic mixture of football and rugby. It's neither. Powerball is soccer. Boring, unwatchable soccer. The only difference between Powerball and any other soccer video game released between 1985 and the present is that the players are cyborgs or robots or something, and you can either kick or run the ball into your opponent's end zone for points.
Note: I know nothing about rugby, so it's very likely that rugby involves similar rules and the use of cyborgs. To the uneducated eye, though, Powerball plays out like a particularly boring and pointless soccer game.
And it's one of this week's featured Virtual Console releases! FINALLY!
King's Knight was the first game to be published in North America by Square Soft. Its music was scored by Final Fantasy series composer Nobuo Uematsu.
Beyond these two bits of trivia that you can use to impress all the girls at the anime convention, there is nothing else interesting or noteworthy about King's Knight. It's a bad game, and it doesn't even have the decency to be bad in a particularly inept way. It's a historical footnote that is impossible to enjoy in any context, and thanks to the increasing hostility of the Wii's Virtual Console service, you can now buy a license to play it for only five non-refundable American dollars.
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