OMG Nintendo

I'm betting a lot of you reading this are too young to remember the heyday of the arcade game developer Data East. They did some NES ports here and there, but by far their most memorable games were their quarter-munchers. If the ESRB is to be believed (and it usually is), there's a collection of Data East games heading to Wii soon, courtesy Majesco.

Retro compilations are usually not so noteworthy, but the ESRB description for the game makes it clear that Data East Collection is going to be special. On top of all time kitschy favorites like Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja, Burger Time, Caveman Ninja (a.k.a. Joe & Mac), Street Slam, and Secret Agent, the collection includes at least one import-only lost treasure.

ESRB confirms that a port of the incredibly fun puzzle game Magical Drop III is going to be included in the collection. Previously this game has only been availble for PC through GameTap, but it's best played head-to-head in your living room with a friend, virulently cursing at each other all the while. There's no word yet on when the Data East Collection ships, but Majesco has yet to officially state that the game really exists. I'm sure it won't be too long before they do, though. 

In North America, the Sega Master System had almost no real market share to speak of. It was a big deal in the UK and Europe, but Nintendo just blew Sega out of the water here.

There was always one game that got people a little curious about that other system, though, and that was Phantasy Star. Whenever you picked up a magazine that wasn't Nintendo Power, there were usually a few lines about it; I remember Game Players' Guide running many letters concerning how to find the hovercraft or how not to get petrified. I knew a lot of guys who rented a Master System back in the day just to check this game out, to see how it stacked up to Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy.

Time hasn't been kind to either Phantasy Star or its series, sadly. The first game is a very 8-bit RPG, complete with an unstated expectation that you will grind your face off. (I have a pet theory that so many people about my age are so prone to constant multitasking because of grindy PC and console games. You had to be watching TV or listening to the radio or something while you circled Corneria killing imps for four hours because otherwise, you would go utterly mad.)

Phantasy Star's big innovations within the genre are some of the earliest RPG cutscenes, the first-person dungeon crawls, its weird science-fantasy setting (wizards riding around in hovercrafts; magic-wielding warriors hacking robots apart with swords), and being one of the first games in general to feature a female protagonist. Alis Lansdale has about as much personality as anyone else does in an eight-bit game, but this is a point in time when Samus Aran suddenly being female caused a medium-wide seismic event.

The game's focus on grinding is most of what makes it hard to play now, after grinding was all but absent in the sixteen and thirty-two bit console generations. (Of course, then it made a big comeback on the PS2, because... I don't know, somebody lost a bet.) Phantasy Star is still an important game, though, especially if you're like me and spent your adolesence wondering about this strange and foreign game for that system nobody had. If you bought Phantasy Star IV last year, you can play the original and get a lot of cameos and references from PSIV that were previously indecipherable.

Arad Senki is not a good anime. (In fact, it's really pretty terrible.) Its ending sequence, though, is one of the most delightful things I've seen in weeks.

Arad Senki is based on the Korean side-scrolling beat 'em up MMORPG known in the US as Dungeon Fighter Online. That game doesn't look or play much like the single-player old-school RPGs being homaged here, but... you know, if there's ever a console spin-off that looks like the video above? I'd play it.

If I had to pick one thing to say about Revenge of Shinobi, it'd be a comment about its difficulty. I've played it a few times before, out of some misguided idea that I, as a hardcore gamer, should be ritually genuflecting in the Shinobi series's general direction, and I've never been able to get much beyond the first stage.

That has not appreciably changed now. The enemies are all a great deal faster than you are, or have gimmicks that can be difficult to circumvent. Ninja magic can help even the odds a bit, such as how the guy in the above speed run uses the lightning shield, but Revenge of Shinobi is a game that's almost entirely about pattern memorization. It is expected that you'll die a great deal before you figure out what's going on, and boy, will you ever.

In a way, Revenge of Shinobi feels like it cheats. You're supposed to be a ninja, but you're up against enemies with far greater ninja/samurai skills than yourself. In later levels, you get to deal with fully-armed soldiers and the occasional superhero. If you've ever wondered by people who grew up playing the Genesis and SNES think modern games are too easy, Revenge of Shinobi is one of the reasons why.

Super Star Wars is an odd relic, in its way, of a time before the Star Wars Expanded Universe had, well, expanded. The Star Wars license has been showing up on any flat surface that can hold it since the original film's release, of course, but the Star Wars video game franchise hadn't truly exploded yet when Super Star Wars came out in 1992.

It's an action-platformer, like most licensed games of the era, with a heavy emphasis on shooting. It'd be amazingly difficult if not for how frequently you can grab life pick-ups, which appear every time you defeat an enemy, and even then, the boss fights are tricky. It's fast-moving, takes heavy liberties with the Star Wars story (see above screenshot), and was well-received at the time of its release. I remember playing it as a kid, and seem to remember not being able to clear the cantina level.

Super Star Wars has aged relatively well compared to a lot of 16-bit games, and I think that owes largely to its smooth and responsive play control. You can fire in nine directions and run very quickly, and while enemies don't come onscreen so much as fly at you hellbent on destruction, you're equipped to handle them. It's oddly generic, honestly - you could put almost any characters into this game, as long as those characters had access to guns - but it's a good licensed game. Even seventeen years later, that still sets it apart from the pack.

Secret Commando is one of the more derivative games I've ever played, as it's a shot-for-shot homage (homage being the word you use if you're feeling charitable) to other 8-bit top-down shooters. There's not much to separate it from Ikari Warriors or Commando or Heavy Barrel or a half-dozen other games of its sort, and all of those games become instantly clunkier and less playable the moment a player gets his or her hands on Smash TV.

Secret Commando isn't a bad example of the form, once you unlearn modern habits. The big innovation of Smash TV was to allow you to shoot in a direction other than the one you're moving in, and every top-down shooter made after that point was smart enough to imitate that. Shooters made before that point are difficult to go back to.

I'll discuss this week's other Virtual Console release, Pulseman, after the jump.

Most casemods of retro systems are about trying to make the cases look new, shiny, or otherwise super-attractive. This casemod, called the "Game Over" SNES, is all about making it look like your system got vomited up from the fiery pits of blackest hell. Despite its bloody and slightly smashed condition, the Game Over SNES works perfectly and even has green LEDs mounted in its innard so it looks extra-creepy if you play it in the dark.

Yeah, yeah, I wish I could've had one of these when I was twelve, too.

Fangamer is probably well-known to the Earthbound fans reading this (all three of you), since they produce some killer unofficial swag for the little game that Nintendo of America keeps trying to forget. Now let me introduce their awesome t-shirt design work to all of the fans of Chrono Trigger reading this.

The design you see above is called "Chronometer," evoking all the awesomeness of Chrono Trigger itself without committing a lot of the usual tacky gamer shirt sins. Fangamer also sell a set of "Millennial Fair" collector pins that evoke a lot of other great images from Chrono Trigger in an unactionable way that involves no illegal use of copyrighted materials.

Like most upstanding work-at-home nerds I like to cultivate a collection of artsy designer t-shirts to coordinate with my pajama bottoms. This is surely going in my collection and if you want it in yours, you'd better act fast. Word on the virtual street is that this design disappears quick.

It took me a second to realize what was going on. A lot of side-scrolling shooters from the eight-bit era are relatively sedate, but Fantasy Zone II is surprisingly intense right from the moment you press start. Then I noticed I could go in either direction... and that I could blow up certain enemies to create warp gates... and that there's a shop I can access, where I can spend the money I'm earning by beating candy out of enemies.

Fantasy Zone II was way ahead of its time. If it was just a shooter, it'd be a good one, but it's actually the kind of genre beerslam that wouldn't be in fashion for a good decade after its release. It's a shooter version of games like Faxanadu, where half the game involves collecting cash to buy the upgrades you desperately need in order to survive.

It's not surprising that you don't hear much about this game anymore, but the more I play it, the more impressed I am by it. There's a lot in Fantasy Zone II that seems to have influenced future games, ranging from bullet-hell shooters to action-RPGs. This does not feel like a product of its time at all; instead, it's like a low-budget but ambitious GBA or DS game.