This week marks the release of the highly anticipated Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Poised to be more than the usual Metroidvania-romp, Ecclesia's glyph system coupled with great diversity in environments and level layout (we're apparently not stuck inside the castle anymore) has all of us whip-enthusiasts drooling with anticipation. To be honest, Konami could slap the word "Castlevania" on a box of assorted animal feces and we'd still pre-order. Here's the part where I'm supposed take a cheap shot at Castlevania Judgment, but admit it: no matter how many times we all spit on the brawler, we never seem to stop checking out movies or screenshots. Castlevania has us whipped; pardon the hideous pun.
Assuming I haven't lost all credibility after the Mega Man list, here's another stab at ranking the best of a legendary franchise. Unlike most other Top 5's, this list is not necessarily Nintendo-specific. Take a gander, and try to pretend that you don't know what number one is.
The Top 5 is a weekly feature that provides us with a forum to share our opinions on various aspects of the video game culture, and provides you with a forum to tell us how wrong we are. To further voice your opinions, submit a vote in the Wii Fanboy Poll, and take part in the daily discussions of Wii Warm Up.
Musicians have Vienna. Catholics have the Vatican. And gamers have Japan. While many significant contributions to the world of gaming have come from outside the Land of the Rising Sun, Japan is the unassailable fountainhead of modern video gaming. It's the birth and workplace of gaming giants such as Hideo Kojima, Shinji Mikami, Yuji Naka, and probably others. To say that Japan is a place that hardcore gamers need to check out is an understatement at best.
Recently, I took a week to visit my brother who teaches English at a Japanese university near Nagoya. Hundreds of thousands of words could be used to describe the wonderful food, the beautiful temples, and the unique culture of the country. But being a life-long gamer, I paid special attention to the distinct connection between the country and the gaming scene we all know and love. For the Top 5, I usually come up with a topic, then list the top five items for that topic in order. For this edition, it was truly difficult to narrow it down to only five. With that in mind, here's my best attempt at listing the Top 5 gaming elements of my time in Japan.
The Top 5 is a weekly feature that provides us with a forum to share our opinions on various aspects of the video game culture, and provides you with a forum to tell us how wrong we are. To further voice your opinions, check out What Are You Playing?, submit a vote in the Wii Fanboy Poll, and take part in the daily discussions of Wii Warm Up.
Every other week, Mike Sylvester brings you REVOLUTIONARY, a look at the wide world of Wii possibilities.
If you're smitten with the Virtual Console, one thing we're sure you aren't in love with is having to swap games between an SD card and your Wii's internal memory, or even worse -- deleting games to be re-downloaded later. WiiWare is on its way and it's hard to imagine My Life as a King demeaning itself to share its estate with less noble games. And certainly not with it bringing microtransactions to the royal ball. And wouldn't it be dandy if some of our multiplatform ports had somewhere to store that downloadable content that everyone is raving about on other consoles?
We wantneed more storage, and some of you have gathered to plead with Nintendo to sell a Wii Hard Drive. It appears that your cries just fall on deaf ears because they seem hardly driven to provide one. In this edition of Revolutionary, we'll examine why Wii can't have a hard drive.
Reggie's recent address in New York failed to tell us much that we didn't already know, though it did throw up the slide you see above, indicating that Nintendo is promising us 200 Virtual Console games in the US by the end of this year. We can probably all agree that the world would be a better place if Pilotwings 64 and River City Ransom were included in that number.
But we digress. See, the folks over at Game|Life did the math, and discovered that would mean Nintendo has only eight Mondays left in 2007 to deliver 34 games. Average that out, and you get 4.25 games a week. Currently, of course, we only get three titles every Monday. So, is this a genuine miscalculation on Ninty's part, naughty marketing hyperbole, or will we really be seeing more retro goodness than normal pumped down our tubes in the coming weeks?
Either way, Nintendo, we are now absolutely holding you to this. 200 by December 31st or you're ripped from our BFF collage. And we do not make such threats lightly.
Australia getting a Virtual Console game before anyone else? Maybe! We can't be sure when Sonic 3 and Super Mario Bros. 3 will find their way onto the VC, but at least we know they're on their way, thanks to the Office of Film and Classification.
The Aussie equivalent of the ESRB keeps a database of ratings just like the ESRB does. A bunch of games have been added, including a lot that are already out in other regions, and a few, like Mario 3, that are news. Of course, the best part of this for people who don't happen to have Australian consoles is that if a game is planned for one region, it's terribly likely it'll be out soon in others!
Other things on the list that make us happy: Strider (although we don't know if it's the Genesis version or the NES version), Galaga '90, and Probotector II-- which is Super C. The full list of new updates is after the break!
This week's Virtual Console releases sees the inclusion of two high-profile Nintendo titles, along with a TurboGrafx16 game we're not familiar with. But, when looking at the two Nintendo titles mentioned, that couldn't matter any less. We know it'll be hard to pry us away from our Wii today, as we get knee-deep in some most excellent gaming.
Today's VC releases are:
Paper Mario (Nintendo 64, 1 player, 1,000 Wii Points)
It's an odd pairing for the weekend for European gamers -- the punk-influenced Air Zonk and the classically adorable Paper Mario! What do they both have in common? A light-hearted approach to gaming and solid offerings for their respective genres. That's something we can get behind.
Due to technical difficulties, we won't be able to provide you with your usual video wrap-up. We're quite sorry, but offer up our usual coverage aside from video after the break in the hopes that it'll keep you from ripping us apart limb from limb happy. Well, happy enough to not kill us.
This probably doesn't affect any readers here (although, if you're a Japan-local Wii Fanboy, let us know!) but we discovered something interesting while drooling at the Japanese Virtual Console page.
Proving their absolute and irrational devotion to historical accuracy, the version of Castlevaniagoing up on the VC this month will not be the same cartridge version that's already been released in the US and Europe. Instead, Japan is getting the original version, which was released for the Famicom Disk System in 1986. The differences include a save state feature and a name entry screen with music unheard in the US version! Which, unfortunately, we can't find. The idea that there's Castlevania music out there that we haven't heard makes us kind of uncomfortable.
Hope you're in the mood for sequels today, because if you're itching for a new retro title, that's what Nintendo's offering up, at least when it comes to Sega. A couple of today's titles were also released in the U.S. this week, which means you can check out the video wrap-up for a little game footage.
Also, for some reason the format of the releases on the Nintendo Europe site seems to have changed, so let us know if these costs are not correct -- we're basing this off past VC pricing.
Dragon Spirit -- TurboGrafx -- 600 Wii points
Ecco: The Tides of Time -- Sega Mega Drive -- 800 Wii points
Golden Axe II -- Sega Mega Drive -- 800 Wii points
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 -- Sega Mega Drive -- 800 Wii points
This week sees the release of a game many fans have been dying to get their hands on: Super Mario Bros. 2. Along with that game, comes a title we're pretty fond of in Ecco: Tides of Time and a game we could do without in DRAGON Spirit. Check out the video above and be sure to head past the post break for the rest of the coverage.
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.
We can't ever get enough of Kirby around here. He's just so cute and puffy. So obviously, when we think Kirby, we think golf. Because, uh ... balls are round. Yep. And what goes well with golf? Commandos.
Right. We don't get this week's pair of releases either, but hey ... maybe opposites really do attract.
This week's Japanese Virtual Console update brings something very rare to the Wii: a role-playing game. And by Capcom's Breath of Fire II is a pretty good one. Also available are a fossilized Konami classic, the sequel to one of the weirdest game concepts ever to become a mainstream hit, and a bizarre first-person space adventure of some kind-- we can't tell if Silent Debuggers is an action game or a graphical text adventure. Anyone out there play the US release on the Turbografx-16?
Also listed as a June release, but with no specified date, is Paper Mario. Since there are no more Tuesdays in June, this one looks like it's getting delayed.
Can you hear that? It's the sound of precious dollars dying, as they're exchanged for so many digital goods that come from the Virtual Console. This week brings a new N64 game, as well as a new SNES and TG16 game. Hit up the video above and see the action, or check the text and images past the break, Or, do both!
The Top 5 is a weekly feature that provides us with a forum to share our opinions on various aspects of the video game culture, and provides you with a forum to tell us how wrong we are. To further voice your opinions, submit a vote in the Wii Fanboy Poll, and take part in the daily discussions of Wii Warm Up. 
Australia getting a Virtual Console game
This week's Virtual Console releases sees the inclusion of two high-profile Nintendo titles, along with a TurboGrafx16 game we're not familiar with. But, when looking at the two Nintendo titles mentioned, that couldn't matter any less. We know it'll be hard to pry us away from our Wii today, as we get knee-deep in some most excellent gaming.
