Sometimes a game has a mechanic so brilliant and works so naturally that I can’t help but wonder where it’s been all my life. Super Time Force revolves around such a mechanic: Single player Co-Op.

Every time you die, you start over. The hook is that your last attempts do as well, fighting alongside you before they repeat their grisly demise. If you die enough, you can amass an army of failures and maybe, just maybe, have a completely successful run.

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Indie developers sure love that retro style. Yet, so many of them fail to execute the idea properly. Whether it’s a horribly inconsistent visual style or slow, floaty gameplay, truly capturing what made old games great often seems just out of reach.

It’s for this reason that I found Oniken so surprising. This is a game that nails the look and feel of an NES game so well that it’s not only convincing to look at, but satisfying to play in that old-school way that eludes so many developers.

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From the tactical espionage action of Solid Snake in Metal Gear to the vampire-slaying exploits of Simon Belmont in Castlevania to the gung-ho guerrilla combat of Bill Rizer and Lance Bean in Contra, Konami made a name for themselves by developing and publishing quality games which could perhaps be best described as “manly.” It was simply something they were good at, and you could even see it in their name (if spelled backwards): “I man, ok?”

Simple, perhaps even subliminal, but effective.

But while those titles have managed to endure, even thrive into the present day, there was another title which was not quite so fortunate: Rush’N Attack.

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To make something fresh, you don’t always have to start from scratch. Sometimes you can take something that’s very well established and simply put it in an entirely different context. Suddenly, what is old becomes new again.

This is something Aliens Infestation does in more ways than one. In it, you’ll find a combination of many things. While the most pronounced is its Metroid “Lite” structure, it also borrows elements from cover based shooters and even has a tinge of survival horror. Everything comes together to form a game with its own strong identity, never feeling like a clone of any of the games it takes inspiration from.

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“Friday Old Games” is a series of articles in which we review a game from the older generations of consoles, share why we picked it, and whether or not it holds up with time.

When Dracula X: Rondo of Blood first made it on the US Virtual Console, I remained casually interested. The early Castlevania franchise has simply never enthused. Yes, the music is always excellent, and the series art has always had the fun Gothic aesthetic, but I just found the whole classic Castlevania era fairly archaic.

Simon Belmont always felt stilted in his movement, almost gawky. Don’t even get me started on how gimped the throwing weapons were. I naturally presumed Rondo of Blood would simply be more of the three NES games I couldn’t get into.

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