It's actually kind of insulting that we don't have a version of the classic Prince of Persia on the Wii. Ubisoft, who currently holds the rights to the series, went so far as to (hire Gameloft to) produce a high-definition 3D remake of the game for Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network, and we have nothing.
There are at least five separate versions of the original Prince of Persia available on systems that the Virtual Console supports -- although there's probably a matter of permission from the original publishers and developers of those versions. We know that Ubisoft isn't against porting Prince of Persia games to the Wii, since one hundred percent of the currently available PoP games on the system are ports.
Nintendo's Donkey Kong features an everyday tradesman saving a helpless, reedy girlfriend from a giant brute, using only his agility and the occasional pickup of a trademark item that makes him super-strong for a short time, marked by a fanfare. Replace the carpenter with a sailor and make the ape a bit less hirsute, and you've pretty much got the theme of every Popeye cartoon.
It's not that surprising, then, that Donkey Kong was conceived as a Popeye game. And it's even less surprising, considering the runaway success of Donkey Kong, that Nintendo was able to secure the rights to the property for a subsequent game.
In a few months, Street Fighter IV will be released on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC. It combines new characters, bright new 3D graphics, and new gameplay systems with a celebration of classic Street Fighter history. Home ports of new Street Fighter arcade games have been a very big deal since Capcom first revealed that they were porting Street Fighter II to the Super NES -- a port that, even at an MSRP of $70, sold over six million copies, more than anything Capcom has released before or since.
But as huge as it was, Street Fighter II was not the first home console port of a Street Fighter game. The first, mostly forgotten Street Fighter was ported to the Turbografx-16 CD-ROM in 1988, and renamed Fighting Street.
Sega has graciously ensured the Wii's status as an excellent RPG platform with downloadable versions of, among other classic RPGs, Phantasy Star II and III. IV is in our future, as well, having been released in Japan and rated for US release by the ESRB. Even Phantasy Star Online is playable on the Wii via GameCube backward compatibility.
There's still one obvious void, and it's one that is also found in compilation titles on other systems: Phantasy Star. Well, and a few Japan-only text adventures. And Phantasy Star Gaiden. But while it's basically totally unreasonable to expect those titles in English for six bucks each, it's not really out of the realm of possibility that Sega could include Phantasy Star on the Virtual Console to complement its sequels.
One of the less famous "black box" early NES games, which falls roughly in the Volleyball/Urban Champion level of fame rather than the Super Mario Bros. level, or even the Hogan's Alley/Donkey Kong Jr. Math level, is an unassuming little game about downhill skiing. Slalom was video game consoles', and America's, introduction to a company who had already risen to relative fame in Europe for their computer games: Rare.
They would later become a fixture on Nintendo systems, providing many of the most memorable games for the NES (and also stuff like Beetlejuice) for various publishers before becoming a Really Big Name for their N64 games. It's a good thing they went on to become the Rare we all know, because even their reputation for googly eyes, collectathons, and endless delays beats being known as the company responsible for making thousands of gamers play a game about staring at some guy's butt.
IGN's Matt Casamassina couldn't stop hinting at a new Kid Icarus game before this year's E3. Even after Nintendo's presentation came and went, Kid Icarus-free, the rumors and Casamassina's insistence had us convinced that Nintendo was just going to spring it on us at any moment; an announcement would come over the loudspeaker on the show floor or something.
In the absence of a new Wii Kid Icarus sequel, I'd be happy to play the other Kid Icarus sequel, Of Myths and Monsters, released on the Game Boy in 1991. As a bonus, it's guaranteed not to be a terrible 3D reimagining.
The latest character to be added to the roster of Konami's questionable Castlevania: Judgment is Eric Lecarde, who appears in IGA's 3D fighter/brawler/potential abomination in the form of a little girl -- at least, that's what seems to be the intention with Takeshi Obata's character design. Eric has made few appearances in Castlevania, especially compared to his Judgment cohorts Simon, Alucard, and, of course, Dracula. He appeared in Portrait of Ruin as a gruff ghost who helped the vampire hunters by standing in one room and doling out quests.
To Judgment players, he may just be some guy with a spear, but his history of being just some guy with a spear dates back to 1994, when he appeared as the spear guy in the Genesis exclusive Castlevania: Bloodlines.
I still can't get over the announcement of a new Punch-Out!! for Wii. It seemed like an obvious choice, sure, but Nintendo has avoided cashing in on plenty of obvious choices. To celebrate, I could have written a post about Super Punch-Out!!, but that's no fun at all. Well, actually, it's a lot of fun, but as a game. Instead, I have decided to reach a bit deeper into the tiny Punch-Out!! catalog and talk about ... the one that isn't about boxing.
In 1985, the Nintendo IRD team created a second arcade game for the bizarre stacked-monitor cabinet that housed Punch-Out!! Like that game, it featured a small, nearly featureless competitor facing off against giant, grimacing dudes who happen to be broad stereotypes. But instead of punching the guys out, you ... wrestle ... their arms ... down. I'd be terrible at writing PR copy. And instead of a kid in a black tank top, you're a dope in a blue shirt with a black sweater-vest on. The effect is that of a rejected 1940's superhero sidekick.
We're ridiculously crazy about Technos and their Kunio games. Normally, the release of any Kunio series game -- save Renegade -- on the Virtual Console would be cause for a weeklong celebration here on Wii Fanboy. We'd break out our special Kunio-shaped cake pans and observe the traditional Kunio Week rituals (playing games). We'd be pushing the game on you in unrelated posts, even.
Unfortunately for Super Dodge Ball, Mega Man 9 had to happen this week and distract everybody. In fact, we are also freaking out about Dodge Ball -- we just delayed our reaction a bit. We'll have our little nerdfest now, in the most counterintuitive way we can think of -- celebrating the NES Super Dodge Ball by talking about another version.
I'm in official PANIC MODE EXTREME over Mega Man 9. I basically freak out every time I see it or am otherwise reminded of its existence. A brand new 8-bit-style Mega Man game, that isn't a spinoff of any kind, is both far too good to be true and the weirdest thing Capcom's done in years. And it reminded me of other weird Mega Man games Capcom's put out over the years.
I can't decide what's weirder: an 8-bit game made in 2008 for all three of today's home game consoles, or a game in which robots built to shoot at each other face off in soccer matches.
When companies other than Nintendo produce and publish games in Nintendo franchises, the results are invariably freaky. In the worst case, the world ends up with something like Hotel Mario and the CD-I Zelda games: unplayable, amateurish games that would actually harm the console they appeared on if said console were not already doomed to flame out. The best case doesn't actually exist for outside-published games, so we'll say it's when Nintendo publishes a franchise game developed by someone else and it puts a fresh spin on an existing series, like Metroid Prime or Super Mario RPG.
The Hudson computer games, like Super Mario Bros. Special, go somewhere in the middle of that ad hoc scale. They don't irrevocably blemish the franchises in which they're made (I still can't think of Zelda, meanwhile, without WONDERING WHAT'S FOR DINNER), but neither are they good enough to contain any ideas that need following up.
Jerry "Tycho Brahe" Holkins and Mike "John Gabriel" Krahulik took the stage at the final round of the PAX 2008 Omegathon and introduced the climactic final game, which would decide which of two Omeganauts would win a trip to the Tokyo Game Show, cash, and a collection of customized, PAX-logo-emblazoned consoles. Last year, two Omeganauts vied for the prize in a round of Halo 3, which had yet to be released in stores. Everyone in attendance anticipated a similar surprise for this year's final round. The two competitors were introduced, and then the cartoonists/hosts unveiled the secret game that would be the arena for the final battle.
It was Vs. Excitebike. After some Famicom Disk System fiddling, the flashing Vs. Excitebike logo appeared on the giant projector screen. The crowd exploded.
We'd totally pay five bucks for that. Or even six.
The Mario Artist series is a set of three games (Paint Studio, Polygon Studio, and Talent Studio) that allow players to create artwork in varying forms. In addition to being pretty neat on their own, they predicted some of Nintendo's biggest developments before they became big. Looking through this suite of three games, we can see a few quite novel ideas that were later refined into massively important releases in other forms -- not the least of which, of course, is the "non-game."
Unfortunately, the one part of Nintendo's strategy that these three titles failed to accurately predict was the releasing games on the 64DD part, which Nintendo did not end up adopting as a business model.
Clu Clu Land is one of Nintendo's most mysteriously underused franchises. Some of the company's early Famicom/NES games never became long-running series because nobody wanted any more -- Urban Champion, for example, or Donkey Kong Jr. Math; some were designed for the R.O.B. robot and died with it (Stack-Up) and some were too generic to really even count as franchises anyway (Baseball). But Clu Clu Land was an original puzzle game that just never reappeared.
Except for that one time! And those other times, kind of!
Weird limited releases like All-Night Nippon Super Mario Bros. are exactly the kind of thing we imagined when Nintendo revealed the Virtual Console, and of course none of it has appeared.
Since it's financially trivial and requires no real commitment of any kind to dump a game on the Virtual Console, there doesn't seem to be any reason not to put obscure games of historical or novelty interest on the service, and yet Nintendo and other companies have yet to jump at the opportunity beyond the occasional rare game like The Dynastic Hero. Never mind Nintendo of America, who seems hesitant to make any game available lest someone buy and enjoy it.
It's actually kind of insulting that we don't have a version of the classic Prince of Persia on the Wii. Ubisoft, who currently holds the rights to the series, went so far as to (hire Gameloft to) produce a high-definition 3D remake of the game for Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network, and we have nothing. 
Nintendo's Donkey Kong features an everyday tradesman saving a helpless, reedy girlfriend from a giant brute, using only his agility and the occasional pickup of a trademark item that makes him super-strong for a short time, marked by a fanfare. Replace the carpenter with a sailor and make the ape a bit less hirsute, and you've pretty much got the theme of every Popeye cartoon.
In a few months, Street Fighter IV will be released on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC. It combines new characters, bright new 3D graphics, and new gameplay systems with a celebration of classic Street Fighter history. Home ports of new Street Fighter arcade games have been a very big deal since Capcom first revealed that they were porting Street Fighter II to the Super NES -- a port that, even at an MSRP of $70, sold over 
Sega has graciously ensured the Wii's status as an excellent RPG platform with downloadable versions of, among other classic RPGs, Phantasy Star II and III. IV is in our future, as well, having been released in Japan and rated for US release by the ESRB. Even Phantasy Star Online is playable on the Wii via GameCube backward compatibility.
One of the less famous "black box" early NES games, which falls roughly in the Volleyball/Urban Champion level of fame rather than the Super Mario Bros. level, or even the Hogan's Alley/Donkey Kong Jr. Math level, is an unassuming little game about downhill skiing. Slalom was video game consoles', and America's, introduction to a 
IGN's Matt Casamassina couldn't stop 
The latest character to be 
I still can't get over the announcement of a new 
We're ridiculously crazy about Technos and their Kunio games. Normally, the 
Jerry "Tycho Brahe" Holkins and Mike "John Gabriel" Krahulik took the stage at the final round of the PAX 2008 Omegathon and introduced the climactic final game, which would decide which of two Omeganauts would win a trip to the Tokyo Game Show, cash, and a collection of customized, PAX-logo-emblazoned consoles. Last year, two Omeganauts vied for the prize in a round of Halo 3, which had yet to be released in stores. Everyone in attendance anticipated a similar surprise for this year's final round. The two competitors were introduced, and then the cartoonists/hosts unveiled the secret game that would be the arena for the final battle.
Clu Clu Land is one of Nintendo's most mysteriously underused franchises. Some of the company's early Famicom/NES games never became long-running series because nobody wanted any more -- Urban Champion, for example, or Donkey Kong Jr. Math; some were designed for the R.O.B. robot and died with it (Stack-Up) and some were too generic to really even count as franchises anyway (Baseball). But Clu Clu Land was an original puzzle game that just never reappeared. 
