Okay, we've clearly had enough great Virtual Console releases over the last month. It's time to dial back the excitement a notch, before we get all jittery and expectation-filled. You know what that means: a week of nothing but TurboGrafx imports!
Luckily, one of this week's premiering games is Gradius II: Gofer no Yabou (TurboDuo Import, 900 Points), a great CD-based port of a rarely seen (outside of Japan, at least) Gradius sequel. Digital Champ Battle Boxing (TG-16 Import, 700 Points), on the other hand, is a boxing game that's not Punch-Out!!, so therefore it has no chance of being at all fun.
On the WiiWare tip, Nintendo offers up a nice-looking and feature-rich port of Tetris in Tetris Party (1,200 Points), while Digital Leisure contributes The Incredible Maze (500 Points), a Labyrinth-styled tilty maze game that probably isn't as good as Kororinpa, but still might be worth a look. It's a tempting lineup to be sure, but I might just end up saving my money for whatever comes out next week.
Secret of Mana
As a teenager, I had my heart set on Secret of Mana. It looked amazing. I'd read the reviews, seen the screenshots, and even bought the mammoth, phone book-sized strategy guide in anticipation of what could only be the best game of all time. After saving money for months, I went to Electronics Boutique on the day I had finally amassed the $60 asking price and proceeded to totally blow it by thinking to myself:
"Hey...I could spend $60 on the game I've been lusting after for most of the year...or I could buy these two Genesis RPGs for the same price!"
So while most sensible people spent a good chunk of their young adult years playing Secret of Mana, I spent that summer playing Shining in the Darkness and Sword of Vermilion. I ended up finishing both, so I definitely got my money's worth. But did I make the right decision?
Nintendo's prepared to take more money from us with this week's stellar Shop Channel lineup, which features a long-awaited Square Enix release and a pair of original and great-looking puzzle games.
Leading on the Virtual Console this week is Secret of Mana (SNES, 800 Points), a multiplayer action-RPG that I'm scared to play again, because I know that it may not hold up too well despite my fond memories. In any case, it's still probably a better choice than Street Fighter II': Special Champion Edition (Genesis, 800 Points), a raspy, all-around inferior Genesis port of Street Fighter II Turbo.
WiiWare boasts the most exciting release news of the week, with debuting titles including the acclaimed physics-based puzzler World of Goo (1,500 Points) and the Orbient follow-up Art Style: Cubello (600 Points). Cubello is interesting, because not only is it not based upon an existing Bit Generations title, but it also vaguely resembles the awesome Tetrisphere (though it likely plays differently).
So what are you picking up this week? I'll probably end up buying everything except SF2, eventually. But what to buy first?
The last month has been an exciting one for WiiWare, with the awaited and fantastic Mega Man 9 debuting alongside out-of-nowhere gems like Art Style: Orbient. Things have been significantly less exciting on the Virtual Console side, but recent weeks have nevertheless brought a good variety of long-demanded classics to the Wii. Is Super Dodge Ball worth your money? Does Vectorman still impress with its Genesis-era graphical trickery? Let's play and see!
The fine folks at 1up.com have done the world a favor by spotlighting what is by far one of the coolest things I've ever seen at a Square-Enix trade show booth: a gallery of original concept, design, and illustration art by Akira Toriyama, produced during the creation of the original SNES version of the RPG classic Chrono Trigger. Clearly all of this stuff was unearthed to help promote the upcoming DS port of Chrono Trigger, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. 1up has a full gallery of big, big images up, and a video walkthrough that gives you more of an idea of what it feels like to amble through the gallery. Great, great stuff.
Chrono Trigger
It's been a long time coming, but the Nintendo we once loved has woken from its coma and is slowly starting to remember us. Sega's beloved strategy-RPG sequel Shining Force II (Genesis, 800 Points) finally comes to the Virtual Console this week, arriving several months after its Japanese Wii debut and almost a year after its initial release announcement.
Nintendo has also recently remembered that the Virtual Console supports Nintendo 64 games, as evidenced by this week's release of Mario Golf (N64, 1,000 Points), which arrives more than five full months after the last N64 VC release (Pokemon Puzzle League, for those keeping track).
Things are heating up on the WiiWare front, too, with this week's featured titles including Some Cell Phone Bowling Game That Everyone is Totally Excited To Pay Eight Dollars For (800 Points) and Holy Balls! A Falling Block Puzzle Game (800 Points). Dack, I am so sorry.
Want to mess around with the goofy music creation mode from Mario Paint? Want to do this on the go, without loading an SNES emulator onto your Nintendo DS flash cart of choice? Do not panic! The homebrew community has whipped up an enhanced version of the Mario Paint music creator called... well, Mario Paint Composer. The homebrew version has more ways to save tracks and more options for how you actually use notes in your songs. It sounds like plenty of fun, though I haven't tried it yet-- I just know I like watching videos of weird songs arranged in Mario Paint on YouTube.
Most fan-translation projects either never get finished or only make progress of the course of many, many years. The progress the Mother 3 Fan Translation has made with their work is comparatively brisk in comparison, really. The translation and main hacking of the game is complete, and now fans only have to wait for bug-testing and tweaking to finish before final release.
Now that the hackings pretty much done (some miniscule things remain which may not be worth bothering with), that just leaves the testing phase. Itll probably start sometime this weekend, and before people start asking, we dont need help testing. The testing will be done internally for several weeks.
In 2006, Nintendo released a budget-priced series of simple but stylish games for the Game Boy Advance. Subtitled "Bit Generations," these titles condensed gaming to its essence, offering up minimal graphics and sound but deep and engrossing gameplay.
The series had never left Japan, until now. In a totally unannounced and unexpected move, Nintendo has remade several titles in the Bit Generations series for release on WiiWare. First up is this week's release of Art Style: ORBIENT (600 Points), a remake of what I thought was overall the best Bit Generations game, Orbital. It's a gravity-based puzzle game that plays sort of like Katamari Damacy in space, all wrapped in a uniquely soothing, ambient presentation. A friend once jokingly described it as what it would be like if Brian Eno made a video game. It's excellent.
Not nearly as exciting is this week's fellow WiiWare offering of Bomberman Blast (1,000 Points), a Wi-Fi multiplayer Bomberman game that seems more like an inevitability than anything else. Then there's Super Turrican 2 (SNES, 800 Points), which...I...NNNGGGH MUST BUY ORBIENT OKAY BYE
Mega Man 9 didn't win me over right away.
I was really looking forward to it, too. I read the interviews. I looked at the screenshots. I frothed with suitable anticipation when Capcom cited Mega Man 2 -- one of my favorite games of all time -- as the design template for Mega Man 9.
After all that buildup, I guess I was expecting a direct follow-up to Mega Man 2. This is definitely not the case. Mega Man 9 struggles to live up to the high standards set by Mega Man 2, and its level of difficulty vastly overshoots previous entries in the series. Mega Man 9 does, however, provide an entirely enjoyable experience throughout, and most importantly, it excels at duplicating the essential heart and ingenuity that is so often missing from the majority of retro-styled remakes and sequels.
