Nintendo Wii Fanboy

An immensely pleasing sight greeted our bleary eyes when we inspected the PAL Virtual Console this morning -- the revival of last September's Hanabi Festival! What does that mean? Simple: for the next few weeks, the VC will feature games that were previously unreleased in Europe or Australia, which we suppose justifies the slightly higher price tags.

Best of all, we're promised that this will continue for the next few weeks. Wonder what else we'll get? Here are this week's trio:

• Columns III: Revenge of Columns -- Mega Drive -- 900 Wii Points
• Final Soldier -- TurboGrafx-16 -- 700 Wii Points
• Gradius II Gofer no Yabou -- TurboGrafx-16 -- 900 Wii Points
  

As usual, make the jump for footage of all three.

[Update: There's much excitement here, as further inspection of Nintendo's press release reveals that Speedos-clad TurboGrafx-16 shooter Cho Aniki will be one of the future Hanabi Festival releases!]

This rare Gradius music box has to be one of the coolest limited-edition game-related items we've ever seen. It's not much to look at -- pretty much just a wooden box with the Gradius logo printed on it -- but it's a Gradius music box. It is a mechanical music box that plays Gradius music. We don't think we have to explain the amazingness of such an item.

Specifically, it plays a 15-second version of "Farewell" from Gradius II GOFER no Yabou. We found an actual recording of the music box in action here. This item was only available as a mail-in offer to people who purchased three Gradius soundtrack CDs.

We don't even get the opportunity to buy soundtrack CDs most of the time over here, and Japanese fans get to listen to those soundtracks as music boxes. Now we just have to ask ourselves: is the best fifteen seconds of Gradius music ever in a box worth $99?

[Via GameSniped]

The biggest surprise for us this week is right there in the title. Balloon Fight is one of the canonical first-generation NES games. It's already out in the U.S. and Europe, and it was even remade for the DS in Japan in a Club Nintendo-exclusive Tingle version. So why has it taken so long to show up on the Virtual Console in Japan? In the time that Japanese Wii owners have been waiting for Balloon Fight, they've gotten two versions of Wonder Boy in Monster World. Similarly, today brings the second version of Gradius II.

Speaking of repeat performances, we'd like to point out how awesomely Treasure is represented on the VC. Light Crusader is the fourth Treasure game to appear on the VC so far, and we appreciate every one. Even Light Crusader.

• Balloon Fight (Famicom, 1-2 players, 500 Wii Points)
  
• Light Crusader (Mega Drive, 1 player, 600 Wii Points)
  
• Dragon Spirit (PC Engine, 1 player, 600 Wii Points)
• Gradius II GOFER no Yabou (PC Engine, 1 player, 800 Wii Points)
• Baseball Stars 2 (Neo Geo, 1-2 players, 900 Wii Points)

... and also Milk. November's Virtual Console outlook for Japan looks pretty excellent, with a lot of delightfully niche stuff. That includes King's Knight, the medieval-themed vertical shooter (!) from Square(!) that nobody likes but us ( ....) It will also bring Sega's Eternal Champions, the goofy Mortal Kombat-influenced fighting game that we poured hundreds of hours into. But it also includes stuff that non-us people will enjoy, like Panel de Pon, which, released in the U.S. as Tetris Attack, is the most popular version of the Puzzle League puzzle games. Light Crusader is notable for being an RPG from Treasure, and not much else.

Of course, the big news for a lot of us is that SNK has turned the King of Fighters faucet on, ensuring a constant stream of fighting games with overdone storylines and ridiculous outfits for at least a year.
Here's the full lineup for November, assuming some of them don't get bumped or pushed back into December (they will):

Famicom: Ganbare Goemon, Balloon Fight, Makaimura (Ghosts 'n Goblins), Nuts and Milk, King's Knight
Super Famicom: Panel de Pon
Mega Drive: Ecco Jr., Light Crusader, Eternal Champions
PC Engine: Dynastic Hero (Wonder Boy in Monster World), Dragon Spirit, Take the A-Train 3, Kawa no Nushi Tsuri (Legend of the River King), Gradius II GOFER no Yabou
Neo Geo: The King of Fighters '94, Baseball Stars 2, Top Hunter

It's Sunday, and you know what that means -- a new edition of Promotional Consideration! Well, that's what it would mean were this post on DS Fanboy, but since the sign we're featuring is for a Virtual Console title, this will have to be a Promotional Consideration article only in spirit.

We haven't come across many Virtual Console advertisements in the states; in fact, we haven't come across any at all. We're reminded of this travesty every morning when we see the lines of blood soaked through VC fanatic JC Fletcher's shirt, traces of his nightly self-flagellation rituals wherein he begs his retro-video-gaming gods to deliver us more ads for classic titles.

The Gradius/Nemesis sign pictured above was found at the Musashi-Urawa train station in Saitama, Japan late last May. When was the last time you saw an ad for a shoot-em-up displayed in a public space? As much as we'd love to see Virtual Console advertisements and posters of enlarged screenshots from 2D games brought over to the US, especially for JC's sake, we doubt that Nintendo of America will ever follow suit.

Many American gamers would consider today's Japanese VC update to have two winners: the isometric RPG Landstalker, and Konami's wonderful SNES shooter Gradius III. Japanese gamers, for whom, of course, this update is intended, would be just as likely to gravitate toward the Famicom version of Namco arcade "classic" The Tower of Druaga, which, uh, they can enjoy with our compliments. We keep getting fooled by Druaga's appearances in Namco Museum collections into thinking that it's really a good game and we're just missing something, but we really don't think we are. It's a brutally hard maze game with unresponsive controls and no point. It's part RPG and part action game and all arrrrrrggghhhh.

This week's Japanese Virtual Console releases:

• The Tower of Druaga (Famicom, 1 player, 500 Wii Points)
• Gradius III (Super Famicom, 1-2 players, 800 Wii Points)
• Landstalker (Mega Drive, 1 player, 700 Wii Points)

The internet has made it easy to find cheats for games, but we miss the tips pages from game magazines, when the discovery of a new code could inspire you to go back to an old game. These codes aren't exactly new, but oldness is the essence of the Virtual Console! We're bringing back the classic codes every week on The VC Advantage.

It would be impossible to write a weekly column about classic game codes and leave out the most famous code of all. It's the first code anyone thinks of when they hear about game cheats, and it's become an enduring symbol of classic video games. You know this code by heart; you may even have a t-shirt bearing its pattern. That's right, we could only be talking about one famous cheat code.

The A, B, B, A continue code from Ikari Warriors II: Victory Road. Oh, or the Konami code. That one's pretty good too.

There are actually only two games available on the American Virtual Console that use the Konami code, and they're both Gradius games.

Gradius (NES): Pressing up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, then Start while paused gives you a load of powerups. All of them, in fact, but Speed Up and Double.

Gradius III (SNES): Gradius III is significantly trickier about the code. Entering up, up, down, down, left, right, left, rightB, A, Start will give you all the powerups and then kill you. You must use the L and R shoulder buttons instead of left and right on the directional pad.

Legend of the Mystical Ninja (SNES) refers to the code in Zone IV, when a character informs you that "if you use the code 'Up Up Down Down L R L R B A', nothing will happen." He is correct.

The Japanese VC has a few more Gradii on which the code works.

Gradius (PC Engine): Pressing up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, II, I works just like it does in NES Gradius.

Gradius II (PC Engine): Entering up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, II, I at the title screen enables all powerups, as usual.

Gradius II (Famicom): The code has two uses in this game: entering up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, then Start at the title screen grants you thirty lives, like in the beloved and missed Contra. Entering the code while paused enables powerups like in other Gradius games.

There are plenty of other games that use this legendary button sequence, but right now on the VC it's the Gradius code. What's your favorite Konami-code-carrying game?

Not only is Japan getting yet more shooters this week, they're actually getting a remake of a shooter that's already available on the Virtual Console. We never believed we'd be in a position to complain about too many scrolling shooters being released. We must say, in PC Engine Gradius's defense, that it is a gorgeous version of Konami's famous shooter. It's also important to note that Image Fight is pretty great, if really hard. Antarctic Adventure is not itself a shooter, but features a penguin protagonist whose son Pentarou would go on to fame in the Parodius series, as well as his own weight-loss-based platformer.

Adventure Island is pretty confusing. This is not the Adventure Island we know in the US, the one about a guy in a red hat and a grass skirt collecting fruit and throwing axes. That series is called Takashi Meijin no Boukenjima (Master Takahashi's Adventure Island). This game, which, in Japan, has the English title Adventure Island, is actually Dragon's Curse, also known as Wonderboy III: The Dragon's Trap. The Wonderboy series is one of the great messes of international game renaming, and is tied up with the other Adventure Island series. This article at Hardcore Gaming 101 should help clear up which game is which. This week's redundant/confusing Japanese Virtual Console releases:

• Antarctic Adventure (Famicom, 1 player, 500 Wii Points)
• Crack Down (Mega Drive, 1 player, 600 Wii Points)
• Gradius (PC Engine, 1 player, 600 Wii Points)
• Image Fight (PC Engine, 1 player, 600 Wii Points)
• Adventure Island (PC Engine, 1 player, 600 Wii Points)

The Virtual Console has made shooting games widely available for the first time in years. We like shooters, despite being categorically awful at them, so we're happy about this. But has the genre been disproportionately represented on the VC? There are so many, versus very few fighting games, and no role-playing games.

Are you guys buying shooters? Are you happy with the selection? Are you all zap zap zap and pew pew pew at the bad spaceships?

The Virtual Console has, surprisingly, become one of the best venues around for classic scrolling shooters, or "shmups" if you prefer. Suddenly, there's a single console on the market where you can play games like Soldier Blade, Super Star Soldier, R-Types I-III, and Gradius, and you can download them all at impulse-buy prices. Soon, Gradius II, Final Soldier and Air Zonk will show up (in Japan, at least).

Has anyone been brought into shooter fandom from a VC release? Or rediscovered the genre, which was lost to all but the craziest, die-hard fans since the onset of 3D gaming? Any new gamers out there surprised by how freaking hard old shooter games can be? Let's hear about your shmupping experience before and since the Wii.

And to think, people assume Nintendo's all kid-friendly! Okay, okay, so sometimes the thug lifestyle is a little colorful when it's designed for the Big N. Still, this week's European VC lineup proves that Nintendo's all about being hard ... at least, when it's tongue-in-cheek or in outer space. Check out this wacky trio of titles up on the block today. Any of them strike your fancy?

• Bonanza Bros. (Sega Mega Drive) -- 800 points
• Comix Zone (Sega Mega Drive) -- 800 points
• Gradius (NES) -- 500 points

It's yet another Monday and you know what that means: more Virtual Console games! This week we're granted access, through the power of Wii Points purchase with real life monies, to a NES title and two TurboGrafx-16 games. Personally, we can't imagine halting our play time with the latest NES game to even give the other two TG-16 games the time of day:

• Gradius - NES (500 Wii Points)
• Soldier Blade - TG-16 (600 Wii Points)
• Dungeon Explorer - TG-16 (600 Wii Points)

Gradius is easily one of our favorite NES games of all time and, quite arguably, the best side-scrolling, 2D shooter in existence. What say you, fine readers? Are you enjoying any of these VC titles released today? Could care less about each of them?