OMG Nintendo

When I was a kid, I once woke up in the middle of the night to find my dad playing Donkey Kong on the NES. Weird thing was, I didn't own Donkey Kong. Turns out that dad was taking one of my Christmas presents for a test drive while I was sleeping, since he was a total video game nerd. Dad tried to explain it away as being an "accidental sample" he stumbled across by entering a secret code in one of the games I owned -- Wrecking Crew -- to keep my Christmas surprise from being spoiled. I believed him, and I continued to believe him even after I got Donkey Kong for Christmas that year.

Years and years of trying to hack dad's code in Wrecking Crew have proven definitively that no, Wrecking Crew does not contain a demo version of Donkey Kong. If you're in the market for a unique and supremely fun puzzle game that hasn't seen imitation or equal since its original release in 1985, though, you should definitely drop five bucks on this week's Virtual Console release of Wrecking Crew.

Mario and Luigi go back to their working-man roots for Wrecking Crew, wherein they serve as members of a demolition crew. From a side-view perspective, players climb up and down the side of a building and break walls with a hammer, and...that just about sums up Wrecking Crew's gameplay in its entirety, really. The game basically boils down to "break stuff."

You can't just run around smashing things like some kind of idiot, though. Enemies -- including the deadly Eggplant Men -- aim to try and kill Mario before he can destroy their precious abandoned buildings. These enemies often prove to be less deadly than one's own carelessness, though, as you can easily trap yourself in your own destructive mess with no way out unless you plan ahead. Luckily, the game includes a "give up" button that can provide an easy escape and a quick restart at any time.

The thing that strikes me most about Wrecking Crew is how weird it is when it comes to power-ups and bonuses. Check out level 4 and you'll see. Depending on which walls you destroy first (or maybe last?) a yellow duck might appear. Hit it for bonus points. If you destroy things in a different order, you might get a different item. Sometimes it's Santa Claus. Sometimes it's a golden hammer that allows you to fight back against enemies, which changes gameplay radically. Wrecking Crew's levels are filled with these kinds of strange bonuses, and it adds further replay value to the game's already massive 100 levels.

Wrecking Crew just might be my favorite first-generation NES game, next to Super Mario Bros. It's fun, it's challenging, and most of all, it's different. Blast Corps for the N64 is about the closest gameplay match released in the years since, and even that missed out on a lot of what made Wrecking Crew so fun.

Wrecking Crew is a download I'd recommend to any Wii owner, and there are precious few games on the Virtual Console more worthy of your five dollars. Check out this gameplay video if you don't believe me. Seriously, look how awesome it is. Go buy it already.