Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Making up for its delayed arrival to Australia's Virtual Console, the TurboGrafx-16 will debut in the world's smallest continent next week with eleven releases! Hudson's VC site lists that over a third of the games will be shmups -- no big surprise there -- but classics like Dungeon Explorer, Military Madness, and Bomberman '93 are also set to appear at the system's opening ceremony.

The US, having been spoiled with dozens of TG-16 releases since the Wii's launch, will receive only one PC-Engine title next Monday: Dragon Spirit, an impossibly hard, vertical-scrolling shoot 'em up in which you pilot a blue dragon. Check past the post break for Hudson's planned releases across all territories this July.

This time, the focus is on the games that made the system so awesome. And also Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. Categorized by, among other criteria, storage format and by whether each is an arcade port or an original game, this list of "Games that Defined the Turbografx-16" covers a lot of the best games for the system. There's quite a bit of stuff on the list, like Alien Crush and Blazing Lazers, for you to go buy on the VC now, and other stuff like Devil's Crush that will ensure that the VC will be providing us with rich, flavorful content for quite some time.

Dude, so we were playing some Alien Crush, and we killed the bonus stage with the dragons over and over again. We totally scored like five billion points and it was so AWESOME that we had to call everyone we knew and tell them about it.

Okay, we're embellishing a bit. When we say we "totally scored like five billion points," we mean that we "continue to be awful at Alien Crush despite playing and loving it for eighteen years." But without our humble admission, you'd have no reason to doubt us! And that leads into our discussion.

Simply put, we want leaderboards. We aren't going to get online play in VC games any time soon (or ever,) so we'll ask for the next best thing. We want to be able to see the high scores for games that, you know, have scores. We don't need prizes or anything. We'd be motivated enough by the idea that we could put our three-letter tag (mine: JC!) at the top of a nationwide or worldwide list if we were any good, which we aren't.

Are high score leaderboards worth doing? Do you see value in friendly competition like this? Or did you always flip right past the high score page in old gaming magazines? Perhaps most importantly, what are your high score initials?

The folks over at Bits Bytes Pixels Sprites have discovered that two new Virtual Console games, as of now unannounced, will be headed to the Wii sometime in the near future. See, in poking around Hudson Entertainment's website, they found pages for both Alien Crush and Dungeon Explorer, mentioning their inclusion into Nintendo's Virtual Console line of games.

For the unaware, Alien Crush is a pinball title with an extra-terrestrial theme, where Dungeon Explorer has playing as Detective John Gutter, a tough-as-nails cop with a dark past. As witness to a rather disgusting murder with no evidence left on the scene beside your testimony, you have 48 hours to find the one responsible before your fellow police officers toss you into the slammer.

OK, we're kidding. You do, in fact, explore dungeons.

[Via Joystiq]