It's that time of year again! The Hanabi Festival begins on Friday on the Virtual Console enabling you to download old games that were never released in the UK.
Named after the Japanese fireworks festivals, The Hanabi Festival is an annual event on Virtual Console and previous years have seen the release of classics such as Sin & Punishment and Super Mario RPG.
So far Nintendo has announced four old games that are being released in the UK for the first time this month. They are Castlevania: Rondo Of Blood (Turbografx), Milon's Secret Castle (NES), Ironclad (NeoGeo) and Lode Runner (NES).
Castlevania: Rondo Of Blood was originally released for Turbografx in Japan in 1993. It has never been available outside of Japan although Castlevania: Dracula X, a game based on Rondo Of Blood, was released for SNES in 1996.
As you'd expect it's side-srolling platforming which puts you in the shoes of Richter Belmont who is forced to take on Dracula after he is revived by the Dark Priest Shaft.
Milon's Secret Castle is an action adventure game that was released for NES in Japan in 1986 and the US two years later. It was developed by Hudson who set their game in the world of Hudson where people use music to communicate with each other. You play as Milon who doesn't have the ability to communicate so he travels through Hudson looking for people like himself. He runs, jumps and shoots down bubbles in a castle but he only has one life and as a result it's a very difficult game.
Ironclad is a 1996 NeoGeo side-scrolling shoot 'em up that was never released outside of Japan.
Finally, there's Lode Runner, an old NES platformer that was released in Japan in 1984 and the US in 1987. It was based on an old Apple II game that was one of the first games to feature a level editor.
You control a man who must collect all the gold in a level while avoiding guards who try to catch the you. There are 150 levels in the game which progressively challenge players' problem-solving abilities or reaction times.
That's all for now. What would be in your dream Hanabi Festival line-up?
