Metal Gear Solid: Ghost Babel
System: Game Boy Color
Original release: 2000
Ghost Babel isn’t canon (and it’s also just called Metal Gear Solid in North America, which is ridiculous since it’s very much not that game or a port of that game at all), but plenty of the usual crew did work on it (along with contract developers extraordinaire, Tose), and Kojima served as a producer. The idea was that so much focus was going into the powerful Playstation 2 and what would become Metal Gear Solid 2, but making a Metal Gear Solid title for “primitive hardware” like the Game Boy Color would allow for Kojima to “go back to my original intent and rethink what a game means.”
The result was a stunning blending of the original Metal Gear style with its Metal Gear Solid evolution—along with some newer structure ideas that would be reused in later releases—to create something must-play. The problem is that, in order to play it, it needs to be available. In a related story, Ghost Babel is going for over $120 for just the cartridge second-hand these days, and it isn’t available anywhere digitally. It wasn’t included in Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, but the non-canon NES version of Metal Gear 2 was, so suddenly it doesn’t seem ridiculous to hope that Konami actually gets it right this time and gives Ghost Babel a second chance to shine. It’s amazing.
Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes
System: GameCube
Original release: 2004
Maybe you don’t like The Twin Snakes. Maybe you’re one of those people with significant problems with The Twin Snakes, even. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s goofy that this GameCube port-slash-remake of the original Metal Gear Solid, co-developed by Silicon Knights, has had just the single release. Sure, the cutscenes are more action-oriented and the game was altered to be more in line with Metal Gear Solid’s Playstation 2 sequel than the original, but Kojima was also around as a producer to push that along, so let’s not act like it’s only because he wasn’t as central to the remake as he was to the Playstation original. The point is that The Twin Snakes deserves to be out there, on modern systems, the same as anything else in the series.
Also, there’s only so many videogames that were made with the involvement of both Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto, you know. The people need to know about things like that.
Parodius Portable
System: Playstation Portable
Original release: 2007
Nearly two decades ago now, Konami collected various shooter series of theirs and plopped them onto single Universal Media Discs. There was one for Gradius games, one for Salamander titles—which also included some Gradius that wasn’t on the first of those—and a Parodius one, as well. The latter two were Japan-only, because even back then Konami liked to taunt us with the promise of better things that would never materialize.
The Parodius games, as you can probably figure out even if you’re unfamiliar, are parodies of Gradius games. Not just the style, but often the games and level designs themselves. They’re great just as far as horizontal shooters go, but they’re also a riot, and show off a version of Konami that seemed to be having so much fun. We’ve gotten into the fact that many of these Parodius titles should be considered for Arcade Archives inclusion before, but let’s try a two-sided attack, and call for a rerelease of Parodius Portable, or a modern equivalent, as well, since it collected the entire series in one place.
The ReBirth trio
System: Wii (WiiWare)
Original release: 2009
Building off of both the rise of smaller digital releases and the revival of classic games that the era of Virtual Console had strengthened with the power of sheer volume, Konami released a small series of games with the “ReBirth” label. First was Gradius ReBirth, then Contra ReBirth, and finally, Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth. All three games were developed by emulation and port powerhouse M2, and were not just throwbacks, but either remixes or remakes of titles from the series they represented. Gradius ReBirth, for instance, didn’t break any new ground, but it was solidly made by people who understood what made Gradius work, and went through the series’ lengthy history to deliver a tour of it.
All three of these games are stuck on the WiiWare service, which you haven’t been able to purchase games from for over half-a-decade now. That there hasn’t been a ReBirth Collection to bring them back to life is a bit odd, but maybe, given how prevalent games from these three series are these days—well, two of the series, Gradius is both remembered and forgotten by Konami in equal measure—Konami just hasn’t seen the need. Still, there’s no reason to single them out, so bring ‘em back.
Pop’n TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventures
System: Super Famicom
Original release: 1994
You probably know TwinBee from its various shoot ‘em ups, but the franchise was popular enough in Japan to end up going in a few different directions. There was a radio drama! There was an anime! Manga, plural! The story bits were removed from North American and European releases of TwinBee games whenever they were localized, but they were part of the appeal in the Japanese releases, which eventually led to things like a TwinBee RPG existing.
There’s also Pop’n TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventures, which is one hell of a side-scrolling platformer for the SNES and Super Famicom. An English-language version does exist out there, since the game received a release in Europe; however, it’s the inferior version of the game since it chopped things up and modified the game’s structure in ways that make it worse than the original. Once again, unofficial translators to the rescue, if you want to see for yourself how much better the Japanese edition is.
Rainbow Bell Adventures has a bit of Rocket Knight Adventures in it, as well as design elements from both Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario games. You can jump on enemies’ heads to defeat them, you can fly around after charging up—and not always in a completely controlled manner—and you have multiple pathways to explore that change the nature of your exploration of the levels. It’s really something, and that’s before getting into how there’s even a bit of Metroidesque exploration to it, in terms of how you find yourself progressing through levels that become more maze-like over time, requiring more from you than just flying around until you find the solution.
I’d settle for an unlocalized Nintendo Switch Online release at this point; I just want more people to check this one out and see what else TwinBee had on offer besides “just” classic cute ‘em ups.
Lagrange Point
System: Famicom
Original release: 1991
Here’s another late-life Famicom release featuring custom cartridge hardware from Konami in order to enhance the experience. Between the date and this chip, though, Lagrange Point never risked being localized, and it’s also never left the Famicom. It’s a sci-fi role-playing game from a time when fantasy had really taken over the genre for the most part. There’s extensive weapon customization, a large, customizable party that gives you far more options than just humans to work with, and, okay, it does have a lot of the grind of the 8-bit RPGs of the era to overcome, but there are modern workarounds for that sort of thing, you know. If Sega can patch in ways for Phantasy Star to have fewer battles that reward more money and experience, then Konami could do that with Lagrange Point, as well.
Ganbare Goemon just like, in general
System: Basically everything before 2005
Release: 1986-2005
There have been five Ganbare Goemon games released in North America. Or, to use the region-appropriate title, five games in the Mystical Ninja series, as in, The Legend of the Mystical Ninja. There was The Legend of the Mystical Ninja on the SNES, Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon on the Nintendo 64, Goemon’s Great Adventure on the same console, a Game Boy title also named Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon that would eventually receive a 3DS Virtual Console release, and the Arcade Archives rerelease of the game that kicked off the entire series, Mr. Goemon.
Do you know how many Ganbare Goemon games there are in total? There are 23 mainline Goemon titles, and another seven spin-offs. A couple of those are portable collections of console titles, sure, but the deficit is still enormous. Goemon showed up in arcades, on the Famicom, on the Super Famicom, on the Playstation, the Playstation 2, the Game Boy, mobile phones, the Game Boy Advance, the Nintendo 64, the Game Boy Color, and even had its own handheld electronic game. Almost none of it ended up leaving Japan, though. And this despite the two N64 titles actually doing pretty well on that system, all things considered!
The Legend of the Mystical Ninja is an excellent platformer with co-op, and it’s been given Virtual Console releases a few times for a reason. It might not have sold well in its initial run outside Japan—Konami never actually shared the international sales data, which probably says a lot—but it’s got more name recognition these days, and the sickos are always good for it. It’s also just one of four (4) Goemon games on the Super Famicom, and the sequels look, sound, and play better! We’ve been robbed, is what I’m getting at.
Even if the idea was just to rerelease the Goemon games that North America already received, it would be a substantial bounty. I consider myself extremely lucky to have N64 cartridges of those two games from the time before the prices went through the roof: it’s nearly $120 for Goemon’s Great Adventure on the secondhand market as of this writing, and that’s if you just want a loose cartridge. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon is “only” about $70 on average, but truthfully it’s all over the place price-wise. Those games rock! They deserve a better and more receptive audience than the one that 1990s America and its critics could give them!
We deserve more than what we’ve already gotten, too. There should be entire Goemon Collections out there. Break them up by system if that’s what it takes, go full Capcom with Mega Man collections if need be, but there are so many Goemon games, most of them exclusive to Japan, most of them never localized unless it’s by unofficial translator’s doing the lord’s work yet again. Tremendous platformers with fantastic humor. Or, as I once put it when discussing Goemon’s Great Adventure:
And that’s Goemon in a nutshell, really. A game with ninjas, some of them robots, some of them capable of turning into mermaids, with some of those mermaids capable of wielding bazookas, and everyone capable of piloting a mech, while just one of them wants to pilot a mech so that they can meet the ghost of James Dean.
How can you not want to investigate a series that decides that’s a key plot point and not just a throwaway joke? How can you not want to play games that ask the question, “What if Commodore Perry came to Japan with an army of robot bunnies and you had to defeat him with a mech in order to find out that he’s just an embarrassing otaku?”
Listen, Spike-Chunsoft localized spiritual successor Bakeru—created by Good-Feel, which was founded by former Konami employees including the primary director of Goemon in the ‘90s who gave the series its lasting shape, and also, one of the playable characters is modeled after him and named similarly— in 2024, and sold it for $40 on Steam and Switch. If Spike-Chunsoft had the courage to roll with releasing a successor to Goemon out west—mech fights and all—in about as crowded of a market as has ever existed, then Konami can bring back the actual Goemon games from their past, too.
While you wait: grab those unofficial translations, of which there are many: teams are working through the entire series, to our benefit. And Bakeru is legit—that was a favorite from 2024. Give that a whirl, too, especially since you might be waiting a long time for the games it drew its inspiration from.
Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.
