Title: Sunsoft Collection 2
System: Evercade
Price: $19.99
Release Date: Early 2024
Prelude
A good while ago, we covered the first of the Sunsoft Evercade volumes, and now we’re back with Volume 2! The rest of the Aero series shows up here, along with a few more gems. It may not have a lot of the 8-bit stuff compared to last time, but what you do get here is very, very solid, and weird!
Presentation
We have Genesis, SNES, GB, and NES here, a nice assortment of games! Baffingly, the Evercade EXP does have an emulation issue with the GB title, Pri Pri, as in that game hitting the menu button at any point will cause the game audio to start stuttering for the rest of the play session.
This does not happen on my Evercade VS, nor my Super Pocket, so why this EXP-only bug is a thing is beyond me, and as of December 2024 it has not been fixed. Otherwise, the emulation is flawless, and on VS/SP, it is flawless for all games.
Gameplay
Seven games this time! Since Volume 1 had a game deleted from it, I still wish that combining 1/2 on the VS would have given those players a bonus title for an even 14 Sunsoft games. Alas, you don’t even get Ikki to goof around with. Still, seven may be more than volume 1’s six games, but is it quantity over quality?
PRI PRI: Primative Princess (GB)- This is a puzzler where you must guide the hero Tom Tom up a tower of many floors, with each floor requiring him to use his trusty hammer to find a way to open the exit ladder to the next floor!
Made originally for Game Boy, Pri Pri is a rather simple puzzler, all being single screen and requiring you to use your noggin to figure out how to get to the exit. Stages seem simple at first, just taking the shortest route to the exit diamond, but you’ll quickly find that trying to rush through the stage will just let you fall through a fake platform. This fake platform is pretty much impossible to distinguish from a normal platform as far as I can tell, so you’ll have to use your hammer to get another avenue to that exit, which is where the fun kicks in.
See, you only have a limited number of hammers to use. Either to knock down a block, or repair a hole left behind. Enemies can be defeated if a block hits them in the head, but otherwise the hammer will not harm them. Thus, the seemingly obvious solution is never the answer, and eventually figuring out the route to using the hammer properly without wasting it is oh-so satisfying. Naturally, that makes Evercade save states better to use at the beginning of the stage compared to the middle of one, since it can get very easy to brick yourself into a no-win situation. Thankfully you can lose a life on purpose by pressing Select, but it will waste a life.
Ultimately, Pri Pri is the kind of pick up and play fun the Game Boy was made for. The invisible platforms are pretty darn stupid, but otherwise I had a pretty good time chipping away at this game over the last few months, even if it does quickly get tough as nails.
Ufouria The Saga (NES)- I sung the praises of this game in detail via the Steam reissue of the Japanese counterpart, so I’ll sum it up here; a great NES metroidvania, long neglected to Europe for the longest time until a VC release that botched the speed of the audio came out, but rejoice, Evercade provides us with the first reissue of European Ufouria to not have bad music emulation!
And yeah, you truly do have an excellent game here. Four different playable characters to choose from, an easygoing start to get your feet wet before that classic Sunsoft difficulty comes back when it’s boss time, and a game world that’s incredibly fun to explore. For a NES game, it honestly astounds me that we got a metroidvania this good on the console, yet so few people got to play it due to the odd circumstances of the original release. Well, no longer. This is a masterpiece of a NES game, and easily the highlight of the cart!
Aero The Acrobat 2 (Genesis)- The sequel to Aero 1! I’ve now reviewed the other Aero games individually, but for some odd reason Blaze/Sunsoft picked this port of Aero 2 over the SNES version. Why? I can’t really know for sure. Maybe due to the better visibility? The weird 3D effects that this port uses to impressive degree?
Either way, you have a solid sequel to Aero that ditches the awful mission system of that game in favor of a more typical platforming experience, and the level design here is far better than Aero 1 as a result. Better stages, better bosses, better autoscrollers, it all comes together for a decent little platforming package. Still not the best to play mind you, but you can have a comfortable time with this one, even if you hated the first game like I did.
This Genesis version doesn’t have the best audio, but compared to Genesis Aero 1 it’s much better on the ears, even if I do miss the outstanding OST of the Super Nintendo version.
Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel (SNES)- Another surprise hit on this cart, this is the Aero spinoff! This was yet another Aero adjacent game I recently reviewed in full, this is just an excellent SNES hidden gem. Take the solid platforming from Aero 2, add in a character with better, more fun movement techniques to mess around and get better with, and you have yourselves one very, very exciting action platformer and the best of the Aero series by far.
A bit of a shame that character design is the way it is. Ouch. Still, if that won’t bug you too much, this is another must-play on the cartridge.
Daze Before Christmas (SNES)- I was honestly tempted to save this review for Christmas solely due to this game, but I figured I didn’t need to arbitrarily hold a review around a a game themed after a holiday that doesn’t apply to the other titles in the collection. So here we have a Santa Claus themed platformer where you control Santa, with the ability to run, jump, stomp, and throw… some sort of snow energy at enemies to defeat them while collecting presents and rescuing elves from the bad guys.
Pretty typical platforming stuff, and to be blunt, pretty typical is the bulk of the Daze Before Christmas experience. The stages are pretty darn easy, and contact damage is seldom the thing that’ll kill you, with falling into a pit being the most common way you’ll end up failing a stage.
If you find a cup of coffee, Santa gets mad and turns into the anti-claus and can hit enemies with his bag, but otherwise the stages are still just getting rid of very easy enemies and clearing some pretty simple level designs until you reach the end. It manages to be a fun, breezy little game that while not cleverly designed, isn’t cheap or frustrating either. Just an average, chill little game, and I honestly found it fitting to work towards clearing in the middle of this Holiday season.
Galaxy Fight (PS1)- This is the European PS1 port of the Neo Geo fighting game! You have a rather scaled down, reduced animation port here, typical of the console, and there isn’t any real bonuses that this version offers over the Neo Geo original save for arranged CD music being an option.
So here you have your typical Neo Geo fighter, ported pretty decently to the PS1, with a lot of the original aspects and difficulty intact. Yes, that means Galaxy Fight is absurdly hard, even on the easiest setting. Yes, you can still beat the game, learn the characters and have a pretty good time with it. Here you pick from one of several characters and go out to fight the other set of them, with the final two fights being against boss characters you can unlock if you manage to clear the game with every fighter, so there is incentive here to go and see all the story endings.
Each character does have their own moveset and skills, and likewise some characters are flat out better than others. Gunther is great at throwing and using a fire attack, and was my first go-to for this game, and after getting the hang of his quirks I managed to make it through several fights without even needing to continue or use a save state. Despite that however, you will have to work for that game clear if you want to beat this game even on easy, and good luck with that final boss!
While the first unlockable character wasn’t too tough for me to fight, the final boss of everybody’s story mode is the typical Neo Geo cheap difficulty boss fight you’ve come to expect from the system, with so many overpowered attacks and counters that I cannot judge anyone for spamming save states just to win the fight. Nevertheless, working to finally unlock the ability to actually play as him and return the pain is by far my best motivator to fully clearing the game, and I cannot deny that even with the frustrations, Galaxy Fight is an excellent fighter, and one that manages to be pretty fun if you have a friend over. While I would have personally picked one of the other Sunsoft PS1 games before this game, I can’t deny how Galaxy Fight fits this collection of weird gems like a glove.
Blaster Master: Enemy Below (GBC)- Released all the way in 2000, near the end of Sunsoft’s second US branch, we have a game that a lot of people mistake for a port of NES Blaster Master, which might make you think this is pointless to throw onto the collection seeing how volume 1 has the original NES game. But no, this is actually an honest to god sequel to the original NES classic, just with a heavy reuse of the world themes from the NES game.
Note I said themes. Not level design, difficulty, gameplay or balancing. While the music is mostly brought from the original game as well, it sounds a lot worse due to being on GBC, and while you may be fooled from a screenshot in thinking Area 1 here is the same as Area 1 on NES, Enemy Below is more or less a remixed, Lost-Levels style sequel to the original game, with way, way harder level designs, (mostly) new bosses, and some differences in gameplay that I argue make this a worse experience to actually play.
See, to make up for the many useless dungeon areas in the original NES game, where you’d go to the end, find nothing and never have a reason to go hunt in any besides the one with the boss, Enemy Below forces you to find a key before fighting the boss. Sounds good for more level and thus, more variety, but the level design in Enemy Below is pitiful from the very first area; lots of similar looking underground rooms, lots of similar looking vertical rooms, and even instances where areas can wrap around and get you completely lost. While in the NES version I never would get lost even if I took years off from replaying the darn thing, this GBC sequel had me googling maps constantly just to know where to find out either where the darn key is, or where to use the darn key!
It truly, truly isn’t fun to play at all, and that isn’t even getting into just how clunky the actual playability is. Tank combat is slow and clunky, the top-down segments completely removed the ability to move diagonally, making it way too easy to get hit along with how horrible the enemy hitboxes are. You do have a password system here along with the Evercade save states, (believe me, you have to abuse them to get any remote sense of fun outta this game) but that doesn’t even save you from how vicious the end of the game is. Fail the final boss, and you get sent back a long, long way to a very painful set of spiked rooms you have to repeat over and over and over again just to try that final fight once more!
Again, more incentive to go nuts on the save states, since I cannot believe this level design was deemed acceptable back in the day; it just is too brutal in a way that misunderstands what made the hard parts of NES Blaster Master fun, and while it may look the part, trust me when I say that Enemy Below does not play the part, and I honest to god wish we got the PS1 sequel instead. (Enemy Below is miles better than the actual Blaster Master 2, for what that’s worth)
Conclusion
Ultimately, Sunsoft 2 is a weird mix of games. Some very, very high points with Ufouria, Galaxy Fight and Zero, and some oddities with Pri Pri, Daze and Aero 2. Then you have the only actual bad game here with Enemy Below, and you have a mixed bag of games that while seemingly better than the 4/6 good games of Volume 1, really ends up being a collection that’ll appeal to you depending on what kind of gamer you are.
No matter what, Ufouria is the standout game of this set everyone will enjoy playing. If you want one game to pick up the cart for, this is the one and I can’t recommend it enough. Zero is another standout game I gave praise to before, and Galaxy Fight is a great fighter if you’re willing to tolerate a brutal AI.
Pri Pri is pretty decent puzzler fun if you can tolerate the cryptic nature of the level design and constant invisible pits, and Daze/Aero 2 are fun platformers that don’t do anything crazy but aren’t bad either, and I enjoyed those far more than Aero 1/Arabian in the prior set. But comparing all of these games to the four NES titles that were really good on Volume 1, and I just can’t place Volume 2 above it for that very reason.
Beating out the all star roster of Silius, Blaster Master, Gimmick and Blaster Master Boy is nearly impossible, so try as Volume 2 might, it manages to be a good set while not surpassing the greatness of Volume 1.
I give Sunsoft Collection 2 a 7 out of 10.