Some familiar faces show up this week on Famicom, along with a few that didn’t make their way to NES. Konami’s Pooyan headlines this episode with a simple but charming and masterfully designed single-screen arcade game hailing from the early career of one of retrogaming’s most infamous minds, Tokuro Fujiwara. It’s less soul-crushing in terms of difficulty than Ghosts ’N Goblins or Mega Man. He was still young. He hadn’t realized that his calling in life would be to reduce millions of children to tears.
Also stepping into the post-Super Mario void, we have City Connection—a good game on NES and a better one on Famicom due to simple release timing. A Flicky-style platformer feels a lot more of-the-moment in 1985 than it did in 1988! And, finally, Hyper Sports, the other set of the raw materials that Konami would combine into Track & Field. Like Hyper Olympic, it feels like half a game. That’s because, for those of us in the U.S., it literally is half a game.
Comments (0)