Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Dave was totally right in his VC Monday Madness video: I enjoy Double Dragon glitches. The best-known glitch -- and the most useful -- is the experience factory found in the second level. It's easy to completely fill up your heart gauge and unlock every move simply by walking over to the pile of girders after the climbing fence, then going back across the fence, and back again. This will cause the Williams enemy who was standing in front of the girders to disappear, and you can punch the crap out of his ghost for as long as your timer allows. Later in the same level you can defeat the boss by running away from him. He disappears and the game counts it as victory. I'm also a fan of the glitch-bat, which occurs when you swing a weapon just as it's supposed to disappear, leaving a weird bar made up of other graphical elements from the game.

But my favorite glitch in Double Dragon on the NES is at best useless and actually pretty likely to hurt you. At the end of the first area, you can climb up these -- gutters? Pipes? I don't know what they are. Really, they're just wall decoration. But you can walk straight up that wall. Walk up high enough and you'll come back up to the bottom of the screen. Walk downward and you'll die. Move left and you'll warp back to the ground. Try to jump or attack and you'll fall over. Sometimes one of the Linda enemies will try to follow you up the wall and will just end up in some flickery jiggle maneuver just off the ground.

I pretty much can't get to this part of the game without messing with the wall for a while. I can't even explain why it's so amusing. I could only find one video of this glitch in action (at around 2:50), but be warned -- it's one of those YouTube videos with audio of some guy mocking the game as he plays -- the scourge of the retrogaming blogger.

Hey, Generic Dudes, guess what? Aksys Games has announced that they are, in fact, bringing the two Technos games found in the ESRB database to the Virtual Console -- along with another one that just happens to be the best game on the Nintendo Entertainment System!

River City Ransom. Next week. Five dollars.

The week after that, Double Dragon will become available (which would be awesome news if not for OMG RIVER CITY RANSOM SERIOUSLY), and the week after that, Renegade. If you don't have a Wii, you should probably go ahead and buy one now, because it just got its killer app.

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.

Rare has been responsible for many of the most beloved games on Nintendo systems throughout the years. RC Pro-Am, Goldeneye 007, and Donkey Kong Country come immediately to mind when thinking about the company and its history of great games.

Taboo: The Sixth Sense is not great, or beloved, or even a game. If it were a game, it would be one of the worst ones on the NES. But if something like Taboo can even have a time, then that time has come.