So yeah, you've probably all heard about the shuttering of Nintendo's Wii Shop, and with it any and all purchases you may have made on the digital storefront. Of course, it doesn't seem like it would be beyond the bounds of possibility to offer all those same games through the Switch eShop instead - it's not like that place has much of a sluice gate right now for new releases regardless - but there are no doubt endless licensing and logistical issues that would prevent such an act of magnanimity. Besides, from reports it doesn't sound like we'll need to wait much longer for the Nintendo Switch Online service to start offering more than its current handful of NES games, so maybe we'll be seeing some of the games lost with the demise of the first iteration of the Virtual Console make a return sooner rather than later.

For the sake of digital archiving, at least of the legal variety, I wanted to make a quick list of all the SNES games that have recently become unavailable to purchase due to the disappearance of the Wii's Virtual Console, that system being a major target of my own archiving works on the Giant Bomb Wiki. Obviously, the "unavailable" list for the entire SNES/SFC library would be a little more comprehensive (to the tune of something like a thousand-plus games), but these are specifically the ones that were available for your legal emulating pleasure and are now... not. (Suffice it to say that any SNES games still available on the Wii U or New 3DS Virtual Console, or on the SNES Classic, are exempt from this list.)

I've separated this into North American and European regions. I'm curious to see which side of the Atlantic suffered worse (we did, of course). If there's an X in the NA/EU column, that means the game was available but is no longer. A circle (O) means it's still available in that region for Wii U. A dash (-) means it was never available on Wii Virtual Console in that region, so no big loss.)

SNES-t We Forget

If y'all ever want me to do the grunt work to find out similar absentees for the NES, Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, or N64, let me know. As someone who's embarked on some occasionally soul-crushing archiving work for these games on our own Wiki, I'm invested in their continued availability and recognition.

Onto this week's games!

Strikey Sisters

Very charmed by this relatively simple but keenly polished example of the older "bat and ball" genre, which began with Atari's Breakout but is more commonly associated with Taito's Arkanoid, which added power-ups and enemies to the brick-smashing formula. A major evolution of Strikey Sisters is the striking itself, which has your avatar swing with an arc that not only reflects the ball in the direction the arc hits it, but can also be used to eliminate enemies and their projectiles. Some enemy attacks are relentless, to the point you need to keep a careful eye on your own avatar as much as you do the wandering ball, but the overall affect is that it adds more layers of strategy and, ultimately, opportunity as you defeat enemies for their useful passive power-ups and potent single-use spells.

As with most games of a twitch arcade nature, it's easier to understand the game's hooks and appeal with gameplay footage rather than text, so be sure to check out Jason playing the game on this UPF or the trailers on Steam to see it in action. Very frantic, but also very fair, which makes it far more palatable than other "B & B" games like Wizorb or Shatter that demand you complete something like ten stages in a row on a small stock of lives or be forced to start over.

Link: Indie Game of the Week 105: Strikey Sisters

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

No More Heroes 2 is the sequel to Suda51's more personal brawler franchise that sees super otaku and wrestling fan Travis Touchdown take up a beam saber he bought online and rise to the top of the United Assassins Association ranking list by eliminating all the professional killers above him for the sake of scoring with a hot girl, very much channelling the spirit of Beavis and Butt-Head. The spin in No More Heroes 2 is that Travis grew so disillusioned by the process, fighting both his childhood sweetheart and estranged twin brother, that he walked away from that world. Circumstances drag him back in however, and now his legend has only grown: the "Crownless King", as the new gaggle of assassins reverentially refer to him. Otherwise the sequel very much keeps in the same spirit of the original, balancing spectacular boss fights that follow "warm up" stages full of disposable goons with optional mini-games based on retro NES titles that serve to earn Travis money for upgrades or improve his stats in some way. The game certainly has its moments, especially with some of the more bizarre opponents you'll face, but there's also ample design and technical issues to dampen the fun - an errant camera, for instance, or the way certain late-game bosses constantly spam their least avoidable attacks. I was kind of meh on it overall, but then I've long grown apart from the character action genre. A more in-depth review can be read below.

Link: Bucketlog January: No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

Assassin's Creed Origins

I gotta say, I'm feeling a little hoodwinked again. This happens every time I'm convinced to come back to the world of pure assassination (but not that one): a new Assassin's Creed entry gets some rave reviews because they made massive improvements to the engine or somehow reinvented itself, and then I play it and all the same annoyances that irked me about the previous games are still there and giving me headaches. I started feeling the burnout with the lackluster Assassin's Creed: Revelations and Assassin's Creed III, and since then AC: Black Flag, AC: Syndicate, and now AC: Origins have all exhibited the same issues I've had with the series ever since, despite attempts from various outlets to sell me on their new changes and updates.

Origins follows Bayek, a Medjay living in the Ptolemic period of Ancient Egypt, as he adopts a stealthy approach to eliminate a group of masked conspirators who were responsible for the death of his son, Khemu. The masked ones' plot revolves around some artifacts of the precursor race of ancients that once existed on Earth prior to humanity: every previous Assassin's Creed game from the second onward has involved them in some way. I've not got much further than that with the story, besides meeting Bayek's equally vicious and vengeance-filled wife Aya and being four-fifths done with the original group of masked jerks, which suggests there's far more to the game than killing them alone.

The RPG and colored loot additions do make exploring the open-world more compelling than usual, but there's still the aforementioned series-wide problems I had hoped had been sorted by now. One such instance is the way the engine can never seem to figure out what you want to do, where holding the "parkour" button is as likely to have you run through an alleyway in pursuit of someone as it is to suddenly make you start climbing the nearby wall as the target sprints ever further away. There was also this instance where I was inside an enemy fort and approaching the rear of an unsuspecting guard while tapping the "stealth takedown" button in anticipation for when I was close enough to perform it, when Bayek suddenly turned 90 degrees and jumped on a nearby horse (that same button also being the "mount steed" button), suddenly alerting all the guards in the vicinity to the audacious horse thief in their midst. If anything, the combat engine is even worse now, losing the balletic counterattack system of the previous games (which found its way into the Batman: Arkham series and elsewhere) for a more chaotic system of evasion rolls and heavy hits that just proves more annoying than anything when you have multiple foes to keep an eye on, almost all of whom will take their bows out and just shoot at you while you try to maneuver around some 8' guy with a big shield. Or those damn hippos.

I'm not enamoured with Assassin's Creed Origins, let's just say, but I'll stick with it for now. Maybe something will click and reveal to me what everyone else sees in this game, or maybe I'll just continue poking around every question mark on the map like some obsessive nutcase even if it all ultimately feels like work.