Nintendo Wii Fanboy

You're likely to need all the help you can get in Mysterious Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer 3, whether it comes from enchanted weapons, scrolls, or -- for the first time -- talismans called o-fuda. While o-fuda are used in Shinto tradition to ward off harm from a home or family, their effects are a little more direct within the Mystery Dungeon. Shiren uses o-fuda to afflict status ailments on monsters.

Another advantage new to this entry: other characters. It's rare in a roguelike to have someone around who not only isn't a monster, but will in fact help you kill monsters. Not that any of this matters. Only the most dedicated, and luckiest, players will do anything in the game besides die. We have to keep telling ourselves that before we get sucked in to basically the hardest RPG on the Wii.

A monster randomly dropped this trailer after we killed it, and we had to carry it around for a while until we found a Scroll of Trailer Identify. We were afraid it was going to be something useless like a trailer for Super Glove Ball, but we lucked out! A +3 Video of Shiren the Wanderer!

It was then a matter of posting it before we died and had to go find another one.

Chunsoft's ridiculously difficult Roguelike series, Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren, is getting a new installment on the console that we kind of thought would be the least likely destination for crazy-hard games. The new edition, Fuurai no Shiren 3, will be in (very nice-looking) full 3D, and will contain a new item-growth feature in which items left in certain spots will improve after a certain number of turns.

Perhaps our favorite thing about this game is that it renders a common criticism of the Wii invalid. As of right now, the Wii officially has the most "hardcore" game of any next-gen console. We do feel a little bit bad about Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon, which is pretty much redundant now.

Coinciding with the Japanese Virtual Console release of Mysterious Dungeon 2: Shiren the Wanderer for the SNES, GameSetWatch columnist John Harris has posted (the first half of) an exhaustive writeup of the game. His @Play column, about roguelikes, is consistently excellent even for those of us who are completely oblivious to the genre, and we're glad to have an excuse to mention this especially involved entry.

It's probably a good idea to read this before you jump into any roguelike (except for maybe Pokemon Mystery Dungeon). Shiren the Wanderer and other Mysterious Dungeon games are a little bit simplified, but still ridiculous in their complexity. Random items must be identified, monsters gain levels if they kill something, and it can take multiple playthroughs of a game to level up a weapon to satisfaction. Even containers are random and may turn out to heal you or destroy your items.

We have limited experience with the Mysterious Dungeon series-- we played the first few floors of Nightmare of Druaga, and then quit before it got into the serious stuff. After getting killed, of course. We don't know if we're brave enough to try another one.

Have any of you ever heard of a sport called gateball? It's some kind of Japanese croquet-like game for kids. It's also the basis for this week's most out-of-nowhere Virtual Console offering from Hudson. We can only say that because, over the years, we've gotten used to the other, objectively weirder game in which the protagonist throws his tethered head at enemies. The other games are both significantly less whaaa? than either of these: NES Open Tournament Golf and a classic Mysterious Dungeon roguelike.

• Mario Open Golf (Famicom, 1-2 players, 500 Wii Points)
• Fushigi no Dungeon 2: Shiren the Wanderer (Super Famicom, 1 player, 900 Wii Points)
• Dynamite Headdy (Mega Drive, 1 player, 600 Wii Points)
• Appare! Gateball (PC Engine, 1-2 players, 600 Wii Points)