The first Evercade Sunsoft Collection was a decent mix of titles, with highlights being Blaster Master, Mr. Gimmick and Journey To Silius. This second pack offers more of the same, with some welcome surprises to boot.
The included games are:
- Aero the Acro-Bat 2
- Blaster Master: Enemy Below
- Daze Before Christmas
- Galaxy Fight: Universal Warriors
- Pri Pri Primitive Princess!
- Ufouria: The Saga
- Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel
Arguably the headline act is Aero the Acro-Bat 2, which manages to improve on its rather tepid predecessor in every way you could mention. There's more variety for starters, and the controls and presentation have received a noticeable upgrade. Keeping with the Aero series, we also get the spin-off title Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel, with Aero's nemesis in the lead role. This will be great news to franchise fans, but in all honesty, this one isn't quite up to the standard of the second Aero game.
There's only a single Blaster Master outing in this pack, and it's the Game Boy Color sequel Blaster Master: Enemy Below – which was apparently developed in the United Kingdom, fact fans. It's a solid enough game and was reasonably impressive for 2000, but it feels a little too much like a retread of the 1988 original and doesn't bring many new ideas to the table.
The 1995 fighting game Galaxy Fight: Universal Warriors is up next and offers unique one-on-one brawling action where the arena scrolls infinitely in either direction – so it's impossible to 'pin' your opponent in a corner. It's hardly in the same league as Capcom or SNK's best '90s efforts, and it's a shame that the original Neo Geo version isn't included here – instead, we get the PS1 port.
Daze Before Christmas is a festive-themed offering which we've covered in-depth on this very site; this action platformer was released to lukewarm reviews back in the '90s, and to be honest, time hasn't done much to improve things. Still, we don't get many Christmas-themed video games these days, so it might be worth booting up later in the year if you fancy giving yourself some seasonal cheer.
Finally, we have the Game Boy puzzle title Pri Pri: Primitive Princess (rather average) and the NES action adventure Ufouria: The Saga, which plays a bit like Metroid and is utterly fantastic, despite what middling critical reception from the time of release might suggest. It's a real hidden gem in the NES library and a fantastic addition to this cartridge.
Much like the previous Sunsoft pack, Sunsoft Collection 2 isn't a slam dunk, but there's enough quality here to make it a worthwhile purchase nonetheless.
Comments 3
Really excited for this one. Looks like my kind of cart!
Didn't Daze Before Christmas originally get extremely distribution? Like only in Australia or something.
But maybe that was just one of the two versions, SNES and Mega Drive.
(one that was announced for a US release at least for SNES, but never came out. Supposedly Nintendo of America did approve the game, as has been questioned before, if it counted as a "religious" game towards NoA's acceptable content policies.)
Sunsoft made some great titles, during the NES era. But when we got to 16-bit era, the quality crashed and burned.
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