Then there’s Mappy-Land, the lesser-known NES-only sequel to the arcade hit Mappy. Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked) It’s perfectly playable – it just may not keep your attention for too long. Like the standard Xevious, this feels fairly primitive compared to other vertical shoot ‘em ups (including the excellent Dragon Spirit: The New Legend, also found in Vol 1), and its high-pitched, looping soundtrack is what we’d imagine dog whistles sound like to canines. This is less a sequel to Xevious (which was included in the first volume) and more an enhanced version, complete with new enemy types that raise the difficulty a tad. The same perhaps can’t be said of Super Xevious, at least not to the same degree. It’s not necessarily worse than its predecessor it’s just different, and though it takes some while to get used to, it can become pretty fun. Rather than making your way through a series of underground tunnels as in the first game, Dig Dug II moves everything to the surface and has you trying to rig together explosives to make cliff edges detonate and crumble, causing any enemies on them to fall into the sea. Pac-Land shares some similarities with the next game in the compilation, Dig Dug II, in that both games are sequels that go in an unexpectedly different direction. This home port (which was also a Famicom-only release and comes to the west for the first time, too) is a reasonable enough rendition, though it certainly suffers visually and its controls are bizarre: you move left and right with the B and A buttons respectively, and jump with the D-Pad. The original arcade version was a seminal release because it was one of the first scrolling platformers before the likes of Super Mario Bros. Pac-Land, meanwhile, is easily one of the more well-known games here: second only to Galaga, arguably. It’s not entirely without merit and may keep you busy for a while. It’s a top-down tank battling game similar to Atari’s Combat (or the Tanks game in Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics, if you’d rather have an example from this millennium), and the aim is to gun down a set number of tanks while at the same time preventing them from reaching and destroying your base. Battle City is a Famicom-only release, made available in the west for the first time.
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