This week, Nintendo finally opened those letters you’ve been sending them about Earthbound and decided to put a new (old) game on the Wii’s Virtual Console.
It’s not Earthbound, but it is Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers, a completely unrelated Neo Geo fighting game. It joins the Super Nintendo version of the original Prince of Persia as the only games added this month, but that doesn’t mean Nintendo has forsaken its various downloadable game services, as two new releases come to the 3DS eShop this week as well.
OK, only one of them is really a new release, and it’s called The Denpa Men: They Came By Wave. The titular Denpa men are tiny invisible creatures that hang out around radio waves. Thankfully, the developers at Genius Sonority have discovered a way for you to use your 3DS to capture them by looking around with its built-in camera. You can then send them into dungeons and force them to battle other tiny creatures on your behalf. As explained in this e-book about the manga Fruits Basket, “Denpa” is a Japanese word used to describe, essentially, someone who is affected by radio waves and goes crazy because of it … so this is like a Pokémon game for people who wear tinfoil hats. If that sounds like your sort of thing, it’s available now for $9.99 on the eShop.
The other game is Quarth (not to be confused with Qarth, the greatest city that ever was or ever will be), which is a Konami-developed puzzler originally released for the Game Boy in 1990. A cross between Tetris and Space Invaders, Quarth has you shooting blocks up at falling shapes in order to turn them into squares and make them disappear. It is available now for $2.99 on your 3DS.
Nintendo has also added a new 3D gameplay trailer for Kid Icarus: Uprising. It’s actually a montage of clips from four previously released trailers, but it’s great for anyone who hasn’t bought the game yet and prefers to watch trailers in one digestible chunk.