The Hanabi Festival on the Wii Virtual Console continues this week. This week is “Ninja Week” (with a little bit of baseball pitched up for good measure). As promised by Nintendo, the Australian Wii Virtual Console shop got Ninja Jajamaru-kun and Ninja Gaiden from the NES, and World Class BaseBall originally released on the Turbografx-16.
Ninja JajaMaru-kun (NES)
Ninja Gaiden (NES)
World Class BaseBall (TG-16)
Each of these cost 600 points (yes, 600 instead of the usual 500 for NES games).
Edmund McMillen of Cryptic Sea has documented the early stages of the quest to get his award winning independant game, Gish, onto WiiWare. Sounds like Reggie of Nintendo America was positive about the idea, but understandably, is a hard guy to schedule a phone meeting with.
Here’s hoping Edmund eventually gets his meeting and all goes well. Fingers crossed we will all be able to enjoy the glory that is Gish on the Wii in the near future.
Here’s the retro-game release schedule for the “Hanabi Festival” on Virtual Console in Australia and Europe, as announced by Nintendo (plus a few extras they didn’t mention). Many of these games have never been released outside of Japan, including the Nintendo 64 Sin and Punishment, a “fixed rail” first person shooter (think House of the Dead or Time Crisis) that promises to be pretty sweet. Lets hope it’s modified to use the Wii Remote as a light gun … that would rock.
September 21st, 2007 — “Ninja Week”
Ninja Jajamaru-kun (NES)
Ninja Gaiden (NES) (aka Shadow Warriors)
World Class BaseBall (TG-16) (the non-Ninja title)
September 28th, 2007 — “Scifi Week”
Sin and Punishment (N64) (ohhh this is gonna be good, I can feel it)
Gradius 3 (SNES)
Legend Of Hero Tonma (TG-16) (the non-Scifi title)
Nintendo clearly have a guilty conscience for delaying the release of all those TurgoGrafx-16 games in Australia. This week, as part of the Japanese Hanabi Festival (fireworks festival), the Australian Virtual Console gets several little gems, previously only realeased in Japan. North America hasn’t got these yet … don’t we Aussies feel special now !
This week is “Mario Week”, giving us Super Mario Bros.: The Lost LevelsSuper Mario Bros 2 (NES) and Mario’s Super Picross (SNES). A non-Mario title was also released: Neutopia II for TurboGrafx-16.
(correction: It’s the original Japanese release of Super Mario Bros 2 for NES … not “The Lost Levels”, which is essentially the same game, same levels and souped-up graphics and sound but was released in Australia as part of the Super Mario: All-Stars compilation).
Hot on the heels of the announcement that Australia will get Neo Geo games on Wii Virtual Console (just like the rest of the world), it has now emerged that Hudson Soft are gearing up to release TurboGrafx-CD and Turbo Duo (PC Engine Duo) games for Virtual Console. Japan will get them first, but early reports are that the rest of the world, including Australia will get them eventually too. Initial Japanese releases will be the RPG series Y’s Book I & II and the zany sidescrolling shooter Chou Aniki.
