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We've been diverging lately into video game history and ephemera in these VC Advantage columns, because those are usually a lot more interesting than just plain old cheats, while keeping in the spirit of extending the enjoyment of games through secrets. But sometimes it's nice to get back to the original stated purpose of presenting codes for Virtual Console games as if we were writing a column in an old gaming magazine.

Mega Turrican seems like an excellent candidate for this treatment, because it is hard as all get out. While previous entries in the franchise involved huge, maze-like levels, Mega Turrican is basically Contra but faster (and with backgrounds that don't contrast enough with the enemies) -- a straightforward left-to-right run-and-gun. And that is almost universal code for "punishingly hard game whose first level you will see about fifty thousand times."

With that in mind, an invincibility cheat seems like a perfectly relevant and helpful thing to offer. It couldn't be easier to pull off, either: just pause the game and hit A, A, A, B, B, B, A, A, A. You don't even have to write this one down! You can also skip a level by hitting right, left, down, right, and then B while paused. And now you can pretend to be successful while playing Mega Turrican!

[Codes via GameFAQs]

Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.

Talking about Fighter's History last week put us in a bit of a Karnov kind of mood (which we didn't realize existed until we were in it). Data East's Karnov is something that seems to have gotten into our NES collection by accident. Everybody seems to have a copy, but the game is too weird to have been intentionally popular. It's one of those games that someone lends you and then moves away, or that you get in a bundle at a garage sale, or from a closeout at a video rental store. There's not anything particularly attractive about Karnov, nothing that would cause kids to pick up the bald-fat-shirtless-Eastern-European-guy game off of the shelf. But, then, this was a system whose best-known mascot was a miniature plumber.

Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.

Perhaps the best way to see the influence of Street Fighter II in early-to-mid-'90's gaming culture is to look at the other fighting games that sprung up overnight. Capcom is, of course, almost directly responsible for the rise of SNK, who made a longterm business from 2D fighting games. And Mortal Kombat is most assuredly a direct response to Street Fighter II, adding features the latter omitted, like ugly digitized graphics, over-the-top violence, and Claymation.

But of all the copies, derivatives, and clones, the most clone-like may just be Data East's Fighter's History, otherwise known as "The game that Capcom tried to sue Data East over."