Game title: Mystical Ninja: Starring Goemon
System: Nintendo 64
Developer: Konami CEK

Why it's so cool: I freaking love this game!
Goemon is no stranger to the video game industry; he's been around since the days of the arcade and NES classics. In fact, his oddly-translated SNES game Legend of the Mystical Ninja has already been released on Virtual Console worldwide, and most of his non-localized games are available on the Japanese VC.

The main character of the Goemon series is, of course, the plucky and heroic Goemon himself—a comical interpretation of the legendary ninja Ishikawa Goemon from Japanese history. Always at his side is the portly, hilarious and often flamboyant Ebisumaru. They're joined by the mysterious and beautiful female assassin Yae, and Sasuke the clockwork robot ninja. And when things get too tough for the four of them, they can always call on Impact, their breakdancing, giant battle-mecha friend who comes with built in roller skates. Weird enough for you yet?

This time around, Goemon and his friends witness a UFO invasion unto their quaint hometown, and watch on in horror as Oedo Castle is turned, via laser beam no less, into a tacky, color-clashing European-style castle. The perpetrators? The Peach Mountain Shogunate, who plot to turn all of Japan into a performance stage upon which to flaunt their fashion disaster costumes and sing elaborate musical numbers.

The game plays kind of like a hybrid between Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time, featuring platforming action as you travel across a vast world filled with dungeons that must be navigated using maps and keys. The overworld is broken up between towns containing inns and item shops, which roughly equate to the real-life Edo Period cities in Japan. A few times throughout the game, Goemon and Co. hop into Impact for a first-person giant robot battle sequence where they can punch the foes and shoot laser beams, with certain secret button combos sending Impact into a flurry of lightning-fast attacks. Coupled with an incredible soundtrack (even featuring three songs with lyrics—impressive for an N64 game!) and some of the corniest Japanese-style jokes you'll ever come across—there's even a canned laughter track accompanying most of the cut scenes—this game remains, to this day, one of my absolute favorites.

Game title: Goemon's Great Adventure
System: Nintendo 64
Developer: Konami CEK

Why it's so cool: In Europe and Australia, this is called "Mystical Ninja 2 Starring Goemon," and while a direct sequel to the first Nintendo 64 game, this one returned to the 2D platformer style of the older games in the series.

While visiting the home of their elderly Wise Man friend (who created both Impact and Sasuke), Goemon and Ebisumaru are introduced to his latest invention—a machine that can resurrect ghosts. Just as the Wise Man is powering it up for a demo, the place is attacked by Sister Bismaru, an insane, gender-confused nun descendant of Ebisumaru from the distant future. He steals the machine and flees, using it to summon the lord of the underworld into the land of the living.

The game plays more like the SNES games than the first N64 title, in that the 3D towns are split between 2D levels on a map screen that must be completed to access the next areas. The levels themselves are presented as sidescrolling platformers, but are still fully modeled in polygonal 3D glory, and the 2D "track" that must be navigated twists and turns all over the place, often overlapping itself as you see alternate paths branch off into the background or foreground. It's a style the Nintendo 64 didn't see in any other game, and it was executed wonderfully. As Goemon and his gang get closer to the final boss, the difficulty ramps up considerably and there are plenty of nail-bitingly difficult stages on the level of even the Castlevania classics, adding to the already daunting task of hunting down every last Entry Pass. This is gaming at its finest.

So why aren't they out yet? Like the Castlevania games mentioned on the first page, the save files for both of these Goemon games were saved externally onto the N64 Controller Pak, not the cartridges themselves. While it's not a hugely complicated deal to simply retool the ROM to search the Wii memory file for save files, it's some extra programming difficulty that has likely resulted in these and other Konami CEK games to be overlooked for the VC process. Here's hoping the hurdle is overcome soon!