Title: Sunsoft Collection 1
System: Evercade
Price: $19.99
Release Date: Late 2023
Prelude
By far the biggest surprise from Evercade’s big reveal stream last year that wasn’t named Duke Nukem, Sunsoft opens the licensing gates to Evercade and brings some gems with them! They’ve been porting a lot of stuff around in general lately and so you may be familiar with some of these games through prior reissues, but there are a few things included here that weren’t ported before, making this Evercade set their reissue debut!
Note that a PEGI listing mentioned an extra game that got scrapped at the last minute. Sadly, that would have been a great one, but there are only six games here, while Collection 2 has seven. Maybe one day that game can resurface? Oh well, but even without it, this game has some epic titles.
Presentation
All NES/SNES/GB here. Our first GB game on the SFG review path! Blaster Master Boy shows up with a weird shade of green that doesn’t match the gray used in some key art on the manual/UI. An earlier GB title on Evercade uses the BW colors, but this is stuck as a green color scheme and honestly, despite initial hesitations the new colors grew on me pretty quickly.
The greens don’t seem as accurate to the DMG brick as I’d like, but it manages to to still look sharp and easy on the eyes, even when playing on a big TV. I do hope Blaze goes back in and lets people choose their own palette for GB titles in the future, but this one at least is well presented and anything that isn’t the ugly GBC default is fine by me. The audio is well emulated here, which is good as Blaster Master Boy has an outstanding soundtrack, and all the NES/SNES stuff sound as they should too, including Gimmick with the special sound chip.
Gameplay
A set of six games approaches, each from a different age of Sunsoft! I find this to be a decent selection of their earlier hits, with a peek into their slightly dark future.
Arabian (NES)– This is Super Arabian, Sunsoft’s first ever Famicom game. Why it’s just Arabian and had the word Super deleted from the title screen is beyond me, but that seems to be a thing Sunsoft did themselves. This is a port of Sunsoft’s letter collecting Arcade game, and while that title was pretty harmless fun with a small scorechasing loop to it, this port is just outright abysmal.
Sure, you probably won’t notice anything wrong when playing the first two levels. Run around, get the jars, and spell the word in the correct order to get bonus points. Enemies in the first two stages are easy enough to kick away, except when you’re hanging onto something where it becomes useless. But then you get to stage 3, where you have to jump from carpet to carpet and get all the jars, and even if you go for ignoring the letter order, the way the carpets fly and the abusive enemy AI will drive you to the brink of insanity. You can even get stuck and die to the carpet, or randomly fall through it, and the difficulty spike here is just incredibly stupid to deal with.
All the simplistic fun the game had going for it gets sucked outta the room on this stage, and clearing the next level is no easier, as there are even more carpets and more bad hitboxes to deal with here. Just a bad game you’ll want to loop once out of curiosity and never touch it again, and while I get the importance due to being their first console game, I’d have much preferred Route 16 Turbo as an early Sunsoft pick.
Blaster Master (NES)– Did you know this game gave me nightmares as a teen due to that intro theme? Yes, it did! But ah, what a difference thirteen years makes. Now instead of being too scared to see the game I eagerly replayed it and had a wonderful time. This is Sunsoft’s first big metroidvania, and it just nails a lot of the fun factor.
From a cool upgradable tank, fun top-down sections, and a godly soundtrack that I argue began Naoki’s legendary track record of good OSTs without a bad song in the bunch, this is a NES classic for a reason, and shines brightly here on Evercade thanks to the save states making the no-saving nature of the original game less of an issue. While I still think the modern entries are far better, this one still holds up remarkably well and is serious fun!
Journey to Silius (NES)- This game was supposed to be a Terminator game at one point, but got turned into this after things fell through. However, this version of the game (with the side scrolling and such) was always meant to be Silius/Raf World, and honestly, it still is obvious even to me, a guy who’s never seen footage of a Terminator movie outside of a promo tape, how much they really wanted to make a Terminator game.
So did they pull it off? Well, this is a side scrolling action platformer, sorta akin to Mega Man, but more with the DNA of other run and guns, where you take control of Jay on a quest to destroy an evil group that took out his father. You don’t get much more of a plot besides that, but right away the game has great play control and very high difficulty, with you using your weapon to shoot at enemies and gaining new weapons upon beating each stage, all of which can come in handy.
You won’t be able to just run blindly at things if you want to survive the stages, and will need high reflexes and a lot of memorization if you want to make it through Silius without a lot of save state abuse. While the game is still fun even if you go through it with states, I found it to be a lot more rewarding to try and beat stages in this one in a single go, and the game is just really fun to make use of the Evercade competition mode in to sharpen your skills. That, and it serves as more of an excuse to keep listening to the soundtrack, which continues Naoki’s record of godly compositions for some of the best music on the entire NES platform. Regardless of how you want to play through this game, this one is a must clear for sure, and one of the NES’ best action games.
Blaster Master Boy (Game Boy)- This game stunned me to see on Evercade because I had no clue who the heck owned this game. Well, Sunsoft does, despite it being a sequel to Hudson’s Bomber King for Famicom. In this US version, you take control of Jason going into a tunnel system too small for SOPHIA to take out the mutant boss from the original Blaster Master, (because he’s too stupid to blow up the tunnel with his tank, I guess) by setting bombs and using your gun against a variety of enemies.
It’s a weird take on Bomberman! With many stages, bosses, and dark areas to explore. Oddly enough, this one I found to be much better than even Robowarrior, due to the bombs no longer being limited in supply, and the early game being much, much easier on the player. There’s lots of wiggle room to get used to the game’s mechanics, the bombs don’t instantly kill you if you get hit by your own blast, and collecting extra items in the dark tunnel like lanterns, life rafts and other bomb types really do help later in the game, especially when dealing with tricky bosses.
Really when you look at both versions closely, Blaster Master Boy is just more Robowarrior, but bigger and better with an outstanding arrangement of the main theme song from Bomber King. The Japanese version has barely any differences from this game in terms of level or boss design, so don’t come in expecting more Metroidvania action like the first Blaster Master. Still, this game is incredibly fun, and was my go-to Super Pocket game for several months on end for good reason, and serves as one of Sunsoft’s hidden 8-bit gems. Super happy this one managed to get a reissue!
Mr. Gimmick (NES)– Oh hey, I covered a port of this one before. Well most of that still applies, as this is an outstanding game with a cool physics system and some godlike songs. The version here on Evercade is an interesting mix of the Japanese original with the soundchip enhancements, but with the EU version’s default life count. While I think it would have been preferred to just offer the untouched JP version, I don’t think the extra lives hurt the game at all as this is still incredibly brutal to go through, especially if you want that true ending.
Considering this game is known for being absurdly rare, absurdly hard, and absurdly tough to play, I found this to be a great time revisiting on Evercade, and Gimmick alone makes the cart quite a bargain. The fast response times and smooth play control really do lead to this being an enjoyable experience on the system, and easily makes this a version well worth playing if you don’t have/want the modern console reissue of the game. The more you don’t know about the game, the more magical it’ll be!
Aero the Acrobat (SNES)- Oh boy. Well, as much as I wished this cart was just Japanese games, we have to dip our toes into the American side of Sunsoft. During the mascot craze of the 90s, Sunsoft US wanted their slice of that pie, and thus they had Iguana throw out this mess of a game. While I enjoy a fair bit of mascot platformers (including both sequels to this game!), this one is just a mess that leads to a very dull experience all around.
You have a jump that can also serve as a dive attack, and while this is useful in spots, a lot of enemies are resistant to it or require multiple hits to take out. You may end up bouncing off of foes as a result, which isn’t fun to deal with. What also isn’t fun, is running straight into an instant death trap like spikes or fire, or having to scramble all over a level to complete whatever arbitrary objective the game wants you to do.
Ah, you hoped it would just be reaching a goal! Nope, sometimes you have to collect stuff or get star blocks or do some weird rollercoaster stage. Aero has a lot of variety, but that variety doesn’t really make the game fun, and the few decent ideas the game has for control falls flat when paired with this miserable level design. I will not be ashamed to confess I enabled a cheat code that lets me end the level on my own terms, solely because going to the end of a stage and learning I missed some random block earlier in the level and thus can’t beat it drove me absolutely bonkers and is just bad, bad design. The bosses are OK, at the very least.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Sunsoft Collection 1 is a good set of mostly excellent games from the legendary developer. While I wish there was a seventh game here to balance out the two awful ones, the four good ones are really, really good, and some of the best games for their consoles. I would have much preferred to kick Arabian out for Route 16 Turbo or kick Aero out for Ufouria or the SFC Hebereke spinoffs, but otherwise this is a darn good set of games only really held back by the fact two of the six are just horrible games.
Still, that’s Sunsoft for you. Their late 80s mastery came after a very bumpy start in the game industry, and that’s where Arabian comes in, while their US branch’s efforts didn’t pan out too well and while it eventually led to some decent games, it ultimately helped kill the company here in the west around the mid 90s. For a historical look at the company’s history, Sunsoft Collection 1 does a surprisingly decent job at that, while offering some must have NES titles.
I give Sunsoft Collection 1 an 8 out of 10,