 One of the best qualities of the Super Nintendo Library is that there's so many games from established franchises that were able to make such a gigantic leap from the 8-bit era to 16-bit. There's the obvious stuff like Mario, Zelda, and Mega Man, but also lesser-known stuff like Equinox, a sequel to the NES's Solstice, and Doraemon Fantasy, a sequel to mylan's Secret Castle, just to name a couple of others. Unfortunately, there's quite a few NES games that were not granted a 16-bit sequel Well, I covered many of those in Part 1, stuff like Crystallis, DuckTales, Kid Icarus, and Metal Storm. I thought I'd expand this idea a bit and make a Part 2, going into a few lesser known titles that really could have spread their wings on a more expansive platform if given the chance. But first, I gotta talk about a more well-known game in Bionic Commando. This game is such a well-designed title, it's a perfect example of balance between your character's abilities and the accompanying level design, and at the time, this game really seemed like the next evolution of sorts for action platforming because there's no jump function here. You have to use your grappling arm one way or another. It forced you to be creative and find your own way to a certain extent anyway, but as you know, Bionic Commando came and went, a Game Boy version was made, and then, nothing. We did get a remake Bionic Commando re-armed in 2008, and that's decent enough, but this is a game that's begging to have new missions with brand new levels. And, okay, spoiler alert, skip to 150 to avoid spoiling the ending of Bionic Commando. Ready? Okay. Yeah, Hitler's head exploded, but that doesn't mean he died, I mean it's Hitler. Someone that evil could easily keep living without a head. Besides, the helicopter only had superficial damage. Headless Hitler could have flown himself out before the base blew up and started a new army of, uh, bads. So yeah, Bionic Commando 2 16-bit edition, Lad, Spencer, and Super Joe vs. Headless Hitler make it happen. I also have to mention a game I looked at a few weeks ago, Guardian Legend, it's a game that combines two completely different modes of gameplay, top-down exploration, and vertical shoot-em-up. This is a case where I not only want to see more of this game, but the story here was actually pretty cool science fiction stuff, which sees you traveling through tunnels inside of a planet in order to activate a self-destruct sequence that will destroy an incoming alien invasion. It's a neat story for an NES game, which makes me think they could have really built something substantial to follow up on the NES original. A potential Super Nintendo sequel also could have addressed the game's flaws as well, like having a map on screen and having some more distinct environments so you don't feel like you're going in circles. We did at least have games like Sigma Star Saga on Game Boy Advance, and definitely check that one out if you haven't, but still, I would have liked to see the Guardian Legend lore continue on. Solar Jetman, Hunt for the Golden Warp Ship, is a bit of a strange one. You're the spaceship pod thing that floats around with similar controls to that of a game like Asteroids, and you navigate huge mazes in all sorts of different settings looking for pieces of a mythical spaceship that's capable of interstellar travel. It's part of the Jetman series that started with the game Jetpack way back in 1983 for the ZX Spectrum. It's one of those games that started with a really simple idea and was built upon further with subsequent releases in the series, but it stopped with Solar Jetman for NES. What I would have liked to have seen from a Super Nintendo edition is the inclusion of the CX-4 ship. Capcom developed it for the Mega Man X series for rotating and scaling wireframe 3D objects. To see effects like this in a Solar Jetman game would have been a really cool callback to the ZX Spectrum days. Yeah, the logistics would have been weird since Capcom owned the chip and all, but still, it would have made for a really interesting game. Here's kind of a goofy one. It's called Stanley, the search for Dr. Livingston, and it's actually based on the real-life adventure of Dr. Livingstone, an explorer of Africa who got lost and was presumed dead. So in the game, you play as Henry Stanley searching across various villages and temples looking for him, or at least looking for clues for his whereabouts. The reason I picked this one is because, well, it's actually a surprisingly neat game, although the platforming can get a bit wonky at times, but I get a Koei vibe from this one. You know, the same company behind all those strategy games on Super Nintendo? Only this game kind of feels like if a Koei game actually had real-time action in it instead of the same old turn-based stuff, fighting snakes with your bare fists and all. I'm not the biggest fan of those SNES Koei games, but they did occasionally strike oil with neat ideas with games like Uncharted Waters or Anindo Way of the Ninja, and I think Stanley, the search for Dr. Livingston, could have fit in right alongside those games if the quests were to continue on Super Nintendo. Next, there's Zen Intergalactic Ninja, and this is a Konami-developed title for NES that didn't arrive until 1993. And holy crap, I'd never known about this game until recently. It looks and sounds awesome. The music in particular is friggin' great, but it's got some pretty major flaws. The first part of the game takes an isometric perspective, and it tries to do platforming. Throw in some big-time slowdown, and you've got yourself a recipe for disaster. Not that this game is bad, you do eventually get some traditional 2D platforming stuff here later on. It's just that there are a lot of spots where this game is really, really frustrating for the wrong reasons. This is a classic case of a game that was just ahead of its time. Isometric platforming certainly wasn't perfect on the Super Nintendo, but the nuts and bolts of a really good game are definitely here, and it could've been made much better on a 16-bit system if given the chance. In part one, I talked about how Zelda II could've potentially been the beginning of something rather than just a one-off 2D action RPG. Unfortunately, we never saw this format continue onto the SNES with Zelda, but we did see other games take up the mantle on NES, like Fuzanadoo, and like Battle of Olympus. This is a really well-made game that borrows a lot from Zelda II, and yeah, it's definitely derivative for better or for worse. But the action here is well done, and the game looks great for an NES game. This is a case where the game just needs a few modern amenities, like a battery save instead of a password system, and a less grindy format so you don't have to spend all frickin' day grinding for olives. Still, this is a solid game that could've at least been as good as something like Ease 3 on Super Nintendo. Here's another action RPG on the NES, The Magic of Scheherazade, developed by Culture Brain, creators of the Super Chinese or the Super Ninja Boy series. That franchise made it to Super Nintendo, but this game was just one and done on the NES, and that's disappointing because this is another game that was way ahead of its time. It's a top-down adventure-style format, but it features both real-time combat and turn-based battles, where you've got other characters helping you out, all while warping between different time periods, kind of like how you can shift between the light and dark worlds and link to the past. There's classes, there's tons of magic spells, they really crammed a lot into this game. But unfortunately, it's really slow-paced, the menus are cumbersome, and there's a password system that's 48 characters long, ugh. Still, this is one of those cases where it was simply the best the NES could do at this point. If this series would've continued on Super Nintendo, it would've thrived. For instance, the controller would potentially be able to eliminate some of the menu stuff by being able to rotate through items or spells using the L and R buttons, and plus there'd probably be an actual battery save. But yeah, this is another case of a game that was just bursting out of the cartridge with so many ideas and so much stuff that the NES couldn't really execute everything in a player-friendly way. Finally, there's Joy Mech Fight, a Famicom game that stayed in Japan and was never localized, and it was developed by Nintendo R&D 1. As you can see, this is completely crazy and insane for an 8-bit console game. There's two game modes here, a single-player mode where you have to defeat 8 enemy robots per level across four levels, and a one-on-one versus fighting mode. Every enemy you defeat throughout the single-player mode unlocks them as a usable character in the fighting mode, meaning there's 36 different characters here, and some of you may recognize a couple of them that made cameos in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. It's crazy to me that this game never received any kind of follow-up on the Super Nintendo considering how popular the fighting game genre was, and I can't help but see that as a missed opportunity. They could've potentially taken this idea and added additional processing power with the Super FX chip to create something way off the wall. And I'm not thinking big blocky polygons or anything like that, I'm thinking Yoshi's Island Earthworm Gym-style craziness in the 2D realm. As it is, you can play this game now on the Switch's NES app, so you can check it out yourself. Alright, that's all for now. I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.