Virtually Overlooked: El Viento

Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.

Wolfteam's El Viento for the Genesis may look like just another 16-bit action platformer, but that's only because it was. But it's not a bad one, and we live in a world now where side-scrolling action games are a rarity. We might as well play some old ones while we're waiting until the end of time for new ones.

Why the game hasn't been announced for Virtual Console yet:
Japanese developer Telenet, of whom Wolfteam was part, was famous for another series with similar art and design: the Valis games. Valis has recently returned as a hentai series, published by Telenet themselves. We get the feeling that they don't have the best attitude toward their old games. Maybe they'll release El Viento on the VC to promote an El Viento hentai game or something. We'd be perfectly happy to play their old stuff and ignore the direction they're taking now.

Why we think it should be on the Virtual Console:
El Viento uses a generic late-'80s anime style like, well, pretty much every other Telenet game, which seemed awfully exotic and unusual to us back in 1991when Renovation localized it, and seems charmingly retro now. It's a win-win! The actual graphics are disappointingly gritty, using way too many black dots in ground and background tiles, but the character sprites help make up for it. Oh, and really great flashy explosions whenever one of the myriad vehicle-bound enemies is destroyed.

The real draw of El Viento is the fast-paced gameplay. To use the universal language of being like other games, it's a faster, less rescue-oriented Shinobi/Rolling Thunder type of sidescroller. As Annet, an incongruous green-haired anime heroine, you run around a grimy cityscape throwing boomerangs at circa-1920s gangsters and annoying cyberpunks. There are tons of enemies in the levels, and the game compensates for this by allowing you to move and throw boomerangs really quickly. It's not Sonic-level Blast Processing or anything, but you can scoot around the screen at a satisfying rate. Going back to games like this is the only way to realize how slow and unresponsive movement has become in modern games, and how much we missed responsiveness. This is the total opposite of tank controls. What was probably a mediocre game then seems incredibly fresh now just because of the controls.


El Viento contains an inexplicable literary connection, as well. In his "Parallax Memories" column, Matthew Williamson identified elements of H.P. Lovecraft's work in El Viento for whatever reason. If, like a lot of nerds, you think the Cthulhu mythology is both awesome and hilarious, there's one more reason to check the game out.

Or, we suppose, you could wait for the inevitable pornographic remake, if that's more your style. But don't expect us to suggest a Wii release of that.