NintendoWare Weekly: Faxanadu, Cozy Fire

Wow, it's a Virtual Console game -- and a good one at that. Faxanadu for NES was developed by Falcom, creators of the Ys and Dragon Slayer series (to which Faxanadu is tangentially connected), and published in America by Nintendo. Oddly enough, however, the now-defunct Hudson Entertainment is listed as the publisher for the VC version (Hudson Soft published the original game in Japan). In gameplay terms, it's a slightly more RPG-ish (and more brown) Zelda 2. And it's on the Virtual Console, in North America, today.

Meanwhile, on WiiWare, there's another damn fireplace sim.

Faxanadu (NES)

WiiWare

Jewel Keepers: Easter Island (Nordcurrent, 1 player, 500 Wii Points): Swap jewels to match three or more of the same color.
Cozy Fire (dtp young entertainment, 1 player, 500 Wii Points): The coziness is in your imagination.
Demo: Rage of the Gladiator (Ghostfire Games, 1 player, 0 Wii Points): A sample of the first-person mythological combat game.
Demo: Learning with the PooYoos: Episode 1 (Lexis Numerique, 1 player, 0 Wii Points): The PooYoos will teach your youngsters about demo limitations (and shapes or whatever).

Virtual Console

Faxanadu (NES, 1 player, 500 Wii Points): Climb the enormous World Tree to find out what's causing it to dry up in this side-scrolling action RPG.

DSiWare

G.G. Series Drift Circuit (Genterprise, 1 player, 200 DSi Points): An old-school top-down racing game with drifting.
Arctic Escape (Teyon, 1 player, 500 DSi Points): Guide a group of penguins out of captivity and back to Antarctica.
Remote Racers (QubicGames, 1 player, 500 DSi Points): Take control of a little RC truck and race around everyday environments.

Reader Comments (25)

Faxanadu was one of my favorite games. Its very fun.. And very hard!

@Golds
A hard NES game? Now I've heard it all.

@Golds
I shall appoint you a title 'Superhero'.
Make sure you live up to it.

@VeeDeeVee Play Faxanadu and get back to us. :)

@Golds

Ditto. I loved Faxanadu.

Awesome that Faxanadu is getting released on VC -- although I keep hearing Olivia Newton John's "Xanadu" when I hear the title. Maybe that song needs to be done in 8-bit.....

@andrewpoe
Right there with ya... Although I disagree with the chiptune remix, that song needs to die out of our collective consciousness, that's what it needs.

@TheShaper

A place where no one ever goes, we are in Faxanadu....

FAXANADU!

Except for the BitTrip games (which I only own Runner, BTW) is there ANYTHING worthwhile on WiiWare?

@TheShaper Arguably that first FFCC game was. Never played it though.

@TheShaper NyxQuest, And Yet It Moves, Contra ReBirth, Castlevania ReBirth, Blaster Master Overdrive, LostWinds 1 & 2, Toki Tori, Cave Story. World of Goo, Megaman 9 & 10, Max & the Magic Marker, Chronos Twins DX, Dr. Mario Online RX, among others.

So in other words, yes.

Wow. Totally forgot about Faxanadu. Certainly got a blast from my past with this post. =)

I'm pretty sure Hudson Entertainment is still active. Other arms of Hudson, such as "Hudson Soft USA" are closed in favor of Hudson Entertainment as the main international branch.

How many times are you guys going to talk about the weekly VC release with "Wow, it's a Virtual Console game"?

Literally, theres a released every week, and you guys act surprised.... every week. They missed like a month of releases sometime last year and ever since then ppl have been shouting VC is dead!!!

these are the same ppl mind you that aren't spending a dime on the service to begin with.

@Co There have been quite a few weeks in recent months that have had no new VC games.

Having said that, Nintendo has yet to release certain VC games some of us are waiting for... such as Donkey Kong 64.

@Powerlord

It's possible that Donkey Kong 64 won't ever end up on Wii VC. Not because it has a Rare-owned arcade game in it, but because the game's size exceeds 42 MB, which is the size limit of all downloadable Wii titles.

Stupid, yes, but them's the brakes.

@Mr Fister
Yeah, but they can still compress it down further these days with modern tech. Majora's Mask was over 40 MB, but they compressed it down nicely.

Good to hear some Faxanadu love! I got the cart sitting on my shelf, begging for the box and manual.

Holy ish. Faxanadu?! That is a name I haven't heard since I was a kid. I never got anywhere in that game but something about it kept pulling me in. That and Festers Quest. Ooooh Fester...how I miss thee.

Wow! Finally a good virtual console game for a change, I think it's been nearly a year since a decent VC game has been released. I love Faxanadu! Sold!

When I was little and after I got the game, for the longest time I thought it was a first party Nintendo title. Chalk it up to the quality of the game and a lack of developer info on the box.

I am free from injury because of the ointment

Faxanadu was pretty fun.

Scroll down to the bottom of this page and get an AMAZING mp3 arrangement of the game's music by Virt:

http://www.biglionmusic.com/category/arrangements

The reason why Hudson is listed as the developer is because Falcom constantly worked with them. Falcom, at the time, did not develop games for consoles at all- only PC games.

So they had Hudson develop Faxanadu with a scenario setting based loosely on their PC game Xanadu. Xanadu, to this day, is still the top selling PC game in Japan, if I recall correctly.

For the last time Jetpack has absolutely nothing to do with DK64 not being on the VC.
Here is an exact quite from a couple years ago on rare's scribes

I have no idea why DK64 hasn't shown up yet, and whether Jetpac would still be in there or they'd replace it with Mario's Cement Factory (which ate about three years of my life as a child) or something. Or maybe a single-screen 2D shooty version of Jet Race would be more appropriate. Who knows? Not us, obviously, or we wouldn't be sitting here pitching clueless alternatives.

See they don't even know why it hasn't been released

I have a gut feeling it has to do with emulating the expansion pak
same reason reason we haven't gotten any FX titles like Starfox or Yoshi's island

NintendoWare Weekly: Faxanadu, Cozy Fire

Faxanadu (NES)

Reader Comments (25)

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 9:48AM Golds said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 10:53AM VeeDeeVee said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 11:16AM Daverator said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 11:19AM Teancum said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 1:59PM Vidikron said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 9:51AM andrewpoe said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 9:56AM TheShaper said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 1:26PM andrewpoe said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 9:55AM TheShaper said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 10:18AM creid8 said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 10:45AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 10:02AM sneekolas said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 10:07AM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 10:10AM Co said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 2:19PM Powerlord said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 3:35PM Mr Fister said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 4:35PM The Aquacharger said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 10:25AM Levi said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 10:30AM AmanteDuck said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 10:40AM SimonBelmont said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 4:13PM Rupee said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 6:13PM Tab said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 6:36PM MDV said

Posted: Feb 21st 2011 10:42PM omgfloofy said

Posted: Feb 22nd 2011 3:42PM Misteramazing said

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