Virtual console games 2009

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IGN Logo Recommends. Steam Deck George Yang God of War Jonathon Dornbush And we're not picking them here. But that's OK. Pokemon Pinball was one of the best of the spin-offs, a traditional portable pinball experience made completely untraditional by the addition of the original Pocket Monsters. You were tasked to earn a high score and keep the ball in play as long as possible, as in standard pinball -- but, at the same time, you were also asked to catch 'em all.

Pokemon creatures would appear on the playing field and you'd bash them with the bouncing Pokeball until they relented, became captured, and added their distinctiveness to your collective.

Anyone who played this one 10 years ago knows how addictive it was, and we'd love to get hooked all over again through the DSi. We'd miss out on the Rumble feature, of course. But sacrifices must sometimes be made. Nintendo's known for its massively popular franchises like The Legend of Zelda and Pokemon -- series that have had tons of sequels and spin-offs over the years.

Every once in a while, though, the company will release a one-shot. And, oftentimes, those one-off designs have proven to be home to some of the most compelling gameplay concepts in the Big N's history. Case in point, Warlocked. This game was a superb, single-shot creation that came to the Game Boy Color and managed to successfully make the case that the real-time strategy genre could work on a handheld.

And not only work, but work well -- Warlocked was frenetically addictive, as it combined the military conquest aspects of popular PC games like Blizzard's original Warcraft with elements of the best Nintendo handheld hits.

This is a game where you could recruit a wizard to turn your enemies into chickens. That's just cool. Sadly, Warlocked has only remained a one-shot release because its intended sequel, Wizards, got cancelled partway through development in the Game Boy Advance era.

A Virtual Console on DSi could do a lot to redeem that loss, though, by giving us another chance to experience the original -- and a whole new audience could be introduced to this singular classic. It was an RPG -- you'd expect just a standard golf sim, and it was that too, but from your first steps into the clubhouse here you knew you were in for an incredibly deep experience.

Mario Golf ended up being a fully-fledged role-playing golf game, wherein your young kid character gained experience over time, "leveling up" his or her skills on the links, and all the while interacting with non-player characters who added tons of personality to the mix.

It's understandable, then, that this was the work of the same team who then went on to create the Golden Sun series in the age of the GBA, a few years later. It's just that good. Well, it's come to this. It's been so long now, with so many years having passed since its release, with no further sequel or spin-off or anything else from the series making it out to the public in any form, that the original Shantae is now being featured in a speculative retro-download wishlist. We fans of the belly-dancing genie girl are now truly desperate.

You should know the story by now -- created by WayForward Technologies who've since gone on to craft such greats as Contra 4 and the upcoming Wii revival of A Boy and His Blob , Shantae was the perfect platformer on the Game Boy Color.

Its crisp character designs, fluid animation and inventive gameplay which involved hair-whipping to attack enemies and dancing to trigger magic effects made it the pinnacle of many players' GBC experiences. It also served as a swan song for the system, as that release date was already well into the age of the new Game Boy Advance and few people were looking back to the Color after getting their hands on it.

At this point, we may never see another Shantae product. Shameful, but true. But, hopefully, if the stars align and Nintendo decides to take the obvious step of offering a DSi Virtual Console service, Capcom, WayForward and Nintendo could all somehow come to an accord that allowed this gem to be re-released in digital form.

Hey, we've got Mighty Flip Champs already. That's getting closer, right? Our big Wishlist here is all pure speculation, as there's been no official announcement that a Virtual Console is in the works for the DSi yet. But, if and when it does happen, it wouldn't just be made for DSi owners in America -- other regions would get in on the action too, and their selections of downloadable titles and represented systems would certainly be different than ours here in the States. Just look at the Wii -- in Japan, Europe and America the lineups of games and emulated hardware are all different.

That being the case, we're going to spend a page here focused on a handheld that never actually made it out in America -- Bandai's WonderSwan Color. This system was a Japan exclusive, and home to several solid game designs over its life cycle of the few years surrounding the turn of the millennium.

It was a contemporary of both the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance, competing with them both and finding some success in that battle. Because the WonderSwan never left Japan, though, many of the game designs made exclusively for it in its home country ultimately ended up being ported to Nintendo hardware in other nations anyway.

Below are our five picks for great games that would be interesting to see make a return through the DSi -- either just for the benefit of Japanese players, or else as potential Import category releases for us here in America.

Who knows, maybe a digital download service would be just the right solution to make Bandai want to revisit the idea of bringing some of these games across the pond after all. It was bad. It was a welcome alternative to the long-running and laborious Battle Network RPGs, which, while good designs in their own right, got to be frightfully repetitive after so many sequential sequels.

With the popularity of Mega Man 9 on WiiWare, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, it's been proven that American gamers will lavishly support retro Mega Man action in downloadable form -- so if DSi brought us the ability to access previously-unreleased titles like this one, its VC could skyrocket to popularity. If you trace things back far enough in the handheld half of the gaming industry, you always come back to Gunpei.

Gunpei Yokoi was the man behind the design of the original Game Boy. Without his work and influence, this article wouldn't be happening -- he kickstarted Nintendo's portable division and, by its impact, all the competition from other companies since.

One of Gunpei's last projects was the WonderSwan hardware -- he'd left Nintendo after the Virtual Boy flopped and was making a new start for himself with a new company. Tragically, Gunpei passed away in after a car accident. To honor his memory, though, his friends and fellow game developers pushed forward with his final projects. And, ultimately, they created this puzzle game that they named after him.

Though not a revolutionary puzzler, Gunpey is an interesting and unique design that has you matching up line segments on a screen intended to be held vertically. But it would still be cool to get the game named after Gunpei in the edition from the final system he worked on -- a great potential selection for the VC, for sure.

Digimon Tamers: Battle Spirit, Ver. The white flag of surrender. By the time rolled around, Bandai was ready to admit defeat -- its WonderSwan Color had been completely eclipsed by the steamrolling success of Nintendo's Game Boy Advance, and the appearance of Digimon: Battle Spirits on the GBA was the company's concession speech. The Digimon brand had never been seen on a Nintendo platform previously -- it was one of the closely-held exclusives that the WonderSwan had all to itself.

After Battle Spirits' release, though, it was clear there was no going back for Bandai. This pick on our list goes to the original WonderSwan edition of that same design, though.

Digimon Tamers: Battle Spirit , Version 1. Essentially a portable interpretation of Super Smash Bros. Though Digimon has never been quite as popular in America as in Japan, it would still be interesting to get this game on our DSi systems through digital download -- to play for fun, but also because of its place in industry history. The homebrew community scored a major victory with the release of this shooter, a fan-created homage to classic "bullet hell" designs like Treasure's Radiant Silvergun.

But, more than that, it went on to become an actual commerical product a few years later -- legitimate retail validation for the blood, sweat and tears that homebrewers and hobbyist programmers put into their labors of love every day. The Wii's Virtual Console is overflowing with great shooter designs, but the DSi's potential Virtual Console probably wouldn't be able to match that same depth of selection -- shooters just aren't as popular a genre on handhelds.

Games like Judgement Silversword, though, could go a long way toward establishing quality in the category, even if quantity was lacking. Finally, perhaps the most important release the WonderSwan Color ever received. Square's notoriously protective of its Final Fantasy property -- so when Bandai managed to get the company to agree to remake its original classic in the series in bit style exclusively for release on the WGC, the industry took notice.

The game arrived and blew most everyone away with its crisp, clean update and accessible new features. And, to top it all off, they remade Final Fantasy II as well. Now the concept of a remake of the first Final Fantasy isn't all that interesting any more, as, since December , that same game has received several more remakes on the Game Boy Advance and PlayStation Portable.

But this WonderSwan release was the original -- before Square went all remake crazy and diluted the impact of the game by re-re-remaking it over and over. So it would be cool to have this particular edition make an encore appearance, especially for those Japanese players who invested in the WonderSwan specifically because of it and then didn't get a full return on their investment in the end.

Here's where things begin to get divisive. Support seems to be mostly unanimous for the idea of a Virtual Console offering emulated editions of older Game Boy games, and Lynx, and Game Gear and whatever else -- but when you stray into the Game Boy Advance era, opinions quickly split into two different camps.

One group of gamers would love to have access to GBA classics in downloadable form, continuing their support for the overall VC concept for the DSi.

The other gang, though, dismisses the notion -- since the previous version of the DS hardware, the DS Lite, is still perfectly accessible and has the ability to play GBA cartridges built in. We've got to side with the former group, though, when we wish for GBA games in downloadable form -- because that's just the direction Nintendo seems to be headed.

The company removed the GBA cartridge slot from the DSi hardware, and that wasn't an arbitrary decision -- they must have finally felt that the DS brand was strong enough to stand on its own, and no longer needed the crutch of Game Boy backwards-compatibility to help it along.

So, even though some DS Lite owners will still be playing their physical Game Boy Advance cartridges for years to come, it's completely reasonable to assume that many of the same titles could also be offered again as digital downloads. And, if that were to happen, it would be cause for celebration -- because the Game Boy Advance had an incredibly strong library of titles.

From enhanced ports of bit SNES titles to wholly unique and original adventures, from highly-anticipated franchise sequels to innovative designs featuring everything from tilt sensors to built-in solar panels, the GBA library covered it all. Nintendo's Metroid franchise had its first portable installment in Metroid II: Return of Samus for the original Game Boy hardware -- the Game Boy Advance, though, is where the series really shined in handheld form.

It was a hard act to follow, but Fusion shined with a great update to the gameplay of the series that subtlely added in new abilities like ladder-climbing for our favorite female bounty hunter, and a unique twist on the story -- Samus has had her DNA fused with that of an actual Metroid.

Fusion set the standard for the series on the GBA and was such a success that the Big N decided to follow it up with another installment a few years later -- Metroid: Zero Mission. Rather than being another new sequel, though, Zero Mission was a robust remake of the original NES Metroid game that expanded and enhanced the storyline of what actually took place on Samus' first mission to planet Zebes.

It, too, was an impressive release. Like the Metroid series, Konami's Castlevania franchise first got its start on Game Boy systems with appearances on the original monochrome hardware -- but, also like Metroid, the outings it had on the Game Boy Advance were the real classics.

Circle of the Moon launched alongside the hardware in , Harmony of Dissonance followed it up a year later, and when rolled around we got the pinnacle of the trilogy -- the game we named the 2 Game Boy Advance game of all time, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.

Aria soared on the strength of a finely-tuned gameplay engine that had been building momentum over the course of all three GBA Castlevania adventures, and stood out from the rest with a unique soul-catching mechanic that fueled hero Soma Cruz's many abilities. Soma himself was also a novel protagonist, as the series rarely strays away from heroes of Belmont descent -- but it did here. In fact, the game pushed the envelope even further by setting its storyline in the future, taking place in the year All of these elements came together, combined with many more subtle details and hidden extras, and created the Castlevania game we'd most love to revisit through DSi download.

After over a decade of watching the series stay firmly rooted in Japan, Nintendo's Wars franchise finally arrived for American fans to enjoy in Advance Wars was the first installment to hit the United States, and it was the perfect entry point -- its colorful characters and vibrant environments perfectly complimented its deep, difficult strategy design and offered new Game Boy Advance owners a truly new, first-party experience like they'd never seen on any previous iteration of Game Boy.

We sank so many hours into waging war through this game that it's hard to recall just how the spell was eventually broken -- probably by its sequel, Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising, which kept the tanks rolling a couple of years later. Though the DS has had a couple of sequels of its own through Advance Wars: Dual Strike and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, we'd still love the chance to take a step back in time to our first experience with the franchise in English.

The Game Boy Advance was home to a lot of great role-playing games, including several notable ones from Nintendo itself. Golden Sun is the one we're picking to profile, though, on the basis of timing -- Nintendo just surprise-announced Golden Sun DS at this year's E3 event, with a scheduled release date of sometime next year.

So, by the time it comes out, it will have been almost nine years since the release of this first Golden Sun adventure. That's a long stretch -- new initiates to the world of the series need to have the chance to re-experience the original before diving into the new one, so Golden Sun should be offered as a VC download in advance of the release of the sequel.

And who would argue? The first Golden Sun was one of the strongest RPG designs on the GBA, with a unique take on magic that had your party of four heroes learning powerful Psynergy techniques from creatures called Djinni which they could then wield in battle, or out in the overworld to solve puzzles. Its battle sequences were also visually dynamic, setting a new standard for flash and flare -- just look at the size of that explosion below.

Isaac might have made a quick cameo in last year's Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but we want more. Yes, that is our demand. Make it happen, Nintendo. Finally, one of our top picks for Game Boy Advance games has always been this installment in the Legend of Zelda series. No, the thing that set this one apart was the brand-new, multiplayer-focused Four Swords mode.

It's actually a little bit ridiculous that Nintendo hasn't already revived the concept for the DS in some form -- it's a perfect fit for the current handheld.

You and three friends all worked together in Four Swords, each of you in control of a different color of Link. You had to all cooperate to solve puzzles and defeat enemies, but, at the same time, you would compete to collect the most Rupees -- one of those classically balanced multiplayer games where you're always bouncing back and forth between helping your buddies and stabbing them in the back.

We'd love to see the concept make a comeback as a standalone DS or DSiWare game, but if Nintendo isn't going to do that then the company could at least offer us this original version -- through Virtual Console.

Beyond those seven potential portable platforms, the forecast for a possible DSi Virtual Console begins to get a bit cloudy. There are a few other notable handhelds from the past 20 years, but many that we haven't named didn't have their own unique titles -- Hudson's TurboExpress just played the same game cards as the TurboGrafx home console, and SEGA's Nomad did the same thing with Genesis cartridges.

One other handheld that might have a slim chance at making a return would be Tiger's Game. It was the first domestic handheld with a touch screen and stylus, and had the ability to go online though the Internet in wasn't nearly as dynamic or accessible as it is today.

We're not going to feature five picks from the Game. Just 20 titles came out for the Game. If it did make a reappearance, perhaps its portable interpretations of Frogger, Sonic Jam or Resident Evil 2 would be part of the encore.

Another off-the-wall pick that could be cool? The Dreamcast's VMU. SEGA's last home console was a disc-based system, and so far those haven't been supported by Nintendo's Virtual Console. The VMU didn't have a ton of standalone titles to call its own -- most of the time the games played on it were simple mini-games that played supporting roles to the full-on experiences spinning on disc.

Have a bit of fun with it. If you want something that's back closer to the realm of possibility, how about this unsung and little-rememberd Nintendo handheld from ?