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Virtually Overlooked: Arkista's Ring
Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative. Arkista's Ring is an action/adventure/puzzle game about an elf girl who battles giant scorpions, orcs, and forest-dwelling ninja in a labyrinth-like forest, all displayed in the charming square-tile graphical style popular with games like Zelda. It was released for the NES in 1990, published by American Sammy. Sammy now owns Sega, and Sega and Nintendo are newly in love. So today's game is kind of timely, in an oblique way. Also it's fun to play and stuff.
Virtually Overlooked: Cave Story
Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.Doukutsu Monogatari (Cave Story) is a free-roaming side-scrolling action adventure game developed over five years by a Japanese designer who goes by Pixel. You can download Cave Story right now and play it on the computer on which you're reading this article, PC or Mac. It's completely free. We have a copy on our own computer that we've played through many times. So why do we want to pay money to play it on the Wii? Because it's that good.
Virtually Overlooked: Ninja Spirit
Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.This is the second time we've ended up following a theme from week to week in these features-- in this case, we wanted to talk about Ninja Spirit for the Turbografx-16, and didn't remember until we started researching that, like last week's Photograph Boy, Ninja Spirit was developed by IREM.The best way to describe Ninja Spirit for people familiar with Virtual Console games is "The Legend of Kage, but good." And we say that as fans of Kage.
Virtually Overlooked: Photograph Boy
Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative. With the combination of the Wiimote and the Virtual Console, it would seem that the point of the Wii is to simultaneously provide new kinds of play and classic games from the past. Irem's Photograph Boy ( Japanese title: Gekisha Boy), released in Japan for the PC Engine (Turbografx-16) is both at once: a completely unique experience that came out in 1992 and had seemingly no influence on game design until Pokemon Snap. Photograph Boy belongs to a genre populated only by itself and its Playstation 2 sequel: the nonviolent side-scrolling rail shooter. And if, for some reason, novelty isn't enough, Photograph Boy is fun!
Virtually Overlooked: SD Snatcher
var digg_url = 'http://www.digg.com/gaming_news/An_impassioned_plea_for_a_Wii_VC_release_of_Konami_s_SD_Snatcher'; Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.We didn't intend to cover the same series two weeks in a row, but recent developments in the world of Virtual Console made a discussion of a Konami RPG for the MSX2 computer seem timely. Maybe, we thought, our prayers for Snatcher caused the universe to swing things our way a little bit. Well, here's another appeal. SD Snatcher takes the violent, gritty, sci-fi detective story of Snatcher, and presents it as a turn-based RPG populated by big-headed "super deformed" characters. We choose to believe this decision was some postmodern playfulness from Hideo Kojima-- deliberately downplaying the dramatic aspects of his game and overlaying obvious videogame conventions on top of it, like when Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid read your memory card. Or it could just have been that Japanese gamers like RPG's a lot.
Virtually Overlooked: Snatcher [update 1]
Update: screens!Welcome to our new weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.This week, we'd like to talk about Snatcher, a Sega CD game from Konami released in the US in 1994. The game was also released in Japan for the MSX2, PC8801, PC Engine CD-Rom, Playstation, and Saturn.Why the game hasn't been announced for Virtual Console yet: Not too long ago, the obvious answer to this question would have been "because it is a graphical text adventure." Luckily, however, the DS has changed that, bringing an era where graphical text adventures are the subjects of rabid fandom. What hasn't changed is that Snatcher is a Sega CD game, and Nintendo has made no announcements regarding support for CD systems. The size of the files may be prohibitive, although it would be possible to save space by compressing the sound and music.
