Today's offerings on Virtual Console: Renegade for the NES, Pokemon Puzzle League for Nintendo 64.
Renegade was a brilliant experimental game very much like The Graveyard. Whereas The Graveyard was a 10-minute game about an old woman who visits a cemetery and dies in her sleep on a park bench, Renegade is a 5-minute game about a man who visits a train station and is savagely murdered by a gang of stick-carrying thugs. Many gamers at the time regarded it as a poignant commentary on the futility of existence. Some pointed to the man's tragic bouffant hairdo as representing terminal cancer.
A popular urban legend at the time held that if the hero could defeat the thugs, he could enter the tantalizing, ever-waiting train in the background and the game would continue, but this is largely considered the stuff of schoolyard tall tales. Note that a Google image search for "renegade nes" only turns up two different images: The train station, and the game over screen.
Which itself is an exhortation by the thugs to stop trying: "Get lost, punk!"
Today's second game is Pokemon Puzzle League. This Pokedrenched variant of the popular Nintendo puzzle game Panel de Pon was actually never released in Japan. True story: When I was living in Kyoto, my friends at the time were pretty crazy fans of the Super NES version of Panel de Pon, and they asked if I could call upon my gaijin superpowers and score them a copy of the N64 game. I did, of course. I'm a nice guy like that.
Speaking of Japan, Japanese gamers who are not you will be treated to four Virtual Console downloads tomorrow:* Axelay* (Super Famicom),* Super Fantasy Zone* (Mega Drive),* Star Parodier *(PC Engine), and Burning Fight (Neo Geo).
Three side-scrolling outer-space shooters in one week! That's got to be a record, even for Virtual Console.
