Nintendo Okie

Howdy everyone. We’re back from the holidays fresh with another batch of history out of the oven. This is the first few days after Christmas and into the New Year so let’s just hop right in and see what’s cooking.

First up on the list is a heaping helping of Virtual Console. December 29th, 2008 only saw one release, but it’s considered by many to be a good one. Zoda’s Revenge: Star Tropics II was released that day on the Virtual Console. Aside from being a very good RPG it was noted for being the next to last licensed game released on the NES.

Our next batch of Virtual Console titles is a triple dose of classic gaming. The games were released for the platform on December 31st, 2007. The first title on that list is Bubble Bobble for the Nintendo Entertainment System. This console port of the arcade game featured the titular dragons Bub and Bob as they traverse through levels, blowing bubbles around enemies and then popping them to dispatch their foes. The game was hugely popular resulting in multiple ports and sequels to the game.

Light Crusader was an action RPG developed by Treasure for the Sega Genesis. It was, in fact, the only RPG released by Treasure and featured a character known as Sir David who was investigating a rash of disappearances in the town of Green Row. There were a number of different weapons and armor that could be combined to give you even more of an advantage as you dispatched the enemies you would encounter throughout your adventure.

The last title in our Virtual Console smorgasbord is Top Hunter: Roddy & Cathy for the Neo Geo. This was a side scrolling platformer that used fighting mechanics similar to the Street Fighter series, which made for some interesting game play elements. Roddy and Cathy and the galaxies best bounty hunters and they’re trying to stop to a group of Galactic Pirates who are raiding the galaxy and causing trouble. There were four levels that you played through before finally reaching the final world and the showdown with the leader of the pirates, Captain Klapton.

Illusion of Gaia hit stores shelves on January 1st, 1994. This an action RPG released for the Super Nintendo by Quintet and Enix, before their merger with Square. While the game had a very large cast of characters, only three, Will, Fredan, and Shadow, were playable. Illusion of Gaia mixed fictional places with real world locations, such as Incan Ruins and the Great Wall of China, to create a unique world for their people to inhabit. The game’s action was fairly simple, but each character had unique abilities that would improve as the story progressed. Like many games at the time, Illusion of Gaia had a number of differences between the Japanese and the American release. Most of these were name changes like Will being known as Tim in Japan, but it also included changes that could have reflected political affiliations. The best example of this being The Jackal, who was known as Black Panther in Japan. When the game released in America it was bundled with a one size fits all T-shirt.

The new year also brought classics to new platforms. January 1st, 2002 saw the release of Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World. This was a port of the original Super Nintendo game released on the Game Boy Advance. This was a near perfect port of the original, with a few modification, namely Luigi having his movement abilities differing from Mario’s. The game was released as a Player’s Choice title, meaning it had achieved more than a million units in sales.

The last bit of news we have was pretty good news for Nintendo. On January 2nd, 2007 they announced that they were upping the production of DS Lite units from 2.2 million a month to 2.5 million units a month. This was in response to the large sales that the system the previous month during the holiday rush. Nintendo has gone on since then to dominate the sales charts month after month with the DS being the number one selling console for nearly all the months since that time.

So there you have it folks. The holidays are over, the release list will start picking up and we’ll start seeing more things appearing in this article. If there is anything you can think of that is coming up soon that you’d like to see featured in the article, please let us know. We’d love to include it in future articles. Don’t forget to leave us a comment or head on over to the forums to talk about what happened This Week in Nintendo History.