Virtual Console Reviews - Page 11

Red Baron, from the freedom and peace-loving nation of birds, Bird Land, faces off in the skies with his rival Blue Max in this side-scrolling shooting game.

Sky Kid is a NES port of the arcade game with the same name. You play as the Red Baron or Blue Max, both famous World War I pilots. Your mission is to fly through hordes of enemy formations, pick up a bomb, and drop it on the enemy's..

In the year 2025, a war breaks out between humans and a hostile alien race.

The Virtual Console certainly isn’t short of 2D shooters. We’ve seen some excellent (and not so excellent) examples of the genre come and go, but most of the games we’ve experienced so far are retro classics and will have been familiar to fans already. Gley Lancer, on the other hand, might not ring any bells with you..

Digital Champ Battle Boxing is a first-person-perspective boxing title that plunges players into the raw intensity of the ring!

When it was first released in 1989 Digital Champ caused quite a stir. Boxing games up to this point had been graphically modest affairs; Punch Out! was (and some would say, still is) the title of choice for prospective pugilists thanks to its entertaining gameplay, but..

Cute'em-up.

Star Parodier is not only one of the best cute'em-ups ever created, it's also one of the best shooters ever made as well. Combining sugary sweet visuals, a stunning musical score, and some of the most responsive play control ever found in a shooter, Star Parodier proves that video game spoofs can be every bit as good, if not better, than...

Overthrow General Morden and win back the stolen weapon, the Metal Slug.

This game might be a bit redundant - seven of the games in the Metal Slug series were already released on the Wii in collective form as Metal Slug Anthology. However, none of the games on that disc allow for classic controller use, so if you desperately want to use it, then you have no choice but to buy it on VC. The Anthology..

Idaten or Benten are celestial warriors who are out to bring an end to the tyrannical rule of the emperor of Planet Builder.

The Japanese are often accused of creating some seriously weird and wonderful videogames. While this reputation is often underserved (with games like Jet Set Willy, Western developers are just as guilty of producing bonkers titles), a few Eastern franchises do stick out as..

A bit of a break from the norm of Naxat Soft's other games.

Break In could have been a great game where you could play a burglar trying to steal some precious jewels; instead it is pool game simulator. These games used to be ten a penny in the arcade halls of old so it is only fitting that some home conversions were made. I am no expert on the game of pool but there seems to be a fairly..

Renegade follows the story of a vigilante who fights his way through countless gangs in order to bring peace back to his city.

Technos’ Double Dragon became a household name and River City Ransom gained rave reviews from all and sundry, but people often forget that the company also released Renegade on the NES, forming what many fans deem to be a classic trilogy of 8-bit fighting games. Sadly,..

Put your Pokémon-battling and puzzling skills to the test against the best Trainers in Puzzle League Village!

Still waiting for Tetris Attack? Well, technically you don't have to wait any longer - Puzzle League is basically the same game with a different name. Tetris Attack, the SNES game, was a Westernized version of the Japanese game Panel de Pon, which starred its own cute cartoon characters..

Two years after its last epic battle, the GRADIUS army recommissions the VIC VIPER super-dimensional warplane to combat the invasion of a new nemesis known as GOFER.

This is an almost arcade-perfect port of the arcade version of Gradius II, which was also known as Vulcan Adventure. Konami made no compromises in choosing the PC Engine’s Super CD format to release this game on, and the music sounds..

Once again its your job to protect the Galactic Empire from an alien invasion using nothing but your trusty starfighter.

There were basically three Star Soldier releases for the PC Engine/Turbografx-16 system, not counting the cute 'em up spin-off Star Parodier. Two of those releases, Super Star Soldier and Soldier Blade, saw a release in the US while the middle of the three releases, Final..

Look out, world. Here we come!

After the well received Summer and Winter Games, Epyx turned their attention to various events from around the globe and brought us World Games. As before, you have the choice of which events to play, and can compete with up to 8 players (each picking a country to represent). Only two of the eight events allow for simultaneous play, with players taking turns at the..

The evil Shogun Kunitoki has long envied the powers of the Ninja brotherhood and would do anything to acquire their knowledge.

Critically acclaimed at the time, and still praiseworthy today, The Last Ninja sees you exploring several superbly detailed environments on your quest to defeat the evil Kunitoki. Picking up weapons along the way, you...

Single Dragon

Double Dragon is a classic NES game that was immensely popular in its day, so much so that it led to a string of sequels. Predictably the NES conversion of the arcade original made some compromises and changes to the game, so the question is whether it stands up well in the current day. In terms of differences from the arcade version,...

As Rhys, the crown prince of the Orakian kingdom of Landen, you are engaged to be married to Maia, a woman from a rival kingdom.

By the time Phantasy Star III was released the series was well on its way to becoming a solid favourite with Western Sega fans, having already become pretty famous in its homeland Japan. With the third game Sega decided to make some sweeping alterations, but the core..

During the past three days, key military computer installations of every major world power have reported security failures.

Impossible Mission is highly regarded as one of the classic Commodore 64 titles, particularly impressive given that it was one of the earliest games released for the system. The considerable success of the game led to numerous ports and sequels, including a recent Wii update,..

Take command of the spaceship Opa-Opa and blast your way through various fantastical levels as you try to take out all the enemy bases in each stage.

Fantasy Zone is one of those great forgotten franchises from the 8-bit/16-bit era that enjoyed lots of attention back in its heyday but tends to be ignored these days. Featuring the exploits of the cute space ship Opa-Opa, this 2D shooter borrows more..

California knows how to party.

The fifth game in Epyx’s highly respected multi-event sports game series, California Games offered just 6 events, as opposed to the 7 or 8 of previous instalments. That’s not to say it suffers as a result, because some of the new events arguably have a lot more depth than, say, sprinting or weight lifting. As in the earlier games, you first pick what events to..

Not quite a home run.

To herald the start of the new baseball season in the USA, it seems fitting that Bases Loaded should get a Virtual Console release. When this was first released on the NES twenty years ago there wasn’t really much that came close to it. The simple, yet innovative gameplay struck a home run with baseball fans all over the world. Like other baseball games of the era, Bases..