Nintendo has just revealed the identity of the fourth 3D Classic game. It will be Konami's TwinBee, a shoot' em up released in 1986. It has still not been confirmed for any region other than Japan.
3DS Buzz said:
Following in the footsteps of Excitebike, Xevious and Urban Champion, comes the fourth 3D reboot for the eShop – Konami’s TwinBee.
We in the west have so far had the chance to download two of the six 3D classics that Nintendo have promised, and following the recent Japanese release of Urban Champion, we now know the identity of the fourth auto-stereoscopic remake. Konami’s 1986 shoot-’em-up TwinBee, is set to be released in Japan next week.
TwinBee has, in fact, got many similarities with the recently released 3D Classic, Xevious. Also originally designed as a coin-operated arcade shooter, the original saw up to two players take control of a two cartoon spacecraft, TwinBee and WinBee. However, whereas the original featured co-operative multiplayer, the 3D Classics version has been confirmed to be one player only. Shame.
The aim of the game is, as with most scrolling shooters, to survive. However, rather than a shot always resulting in instant death, a rather clever (for 1986 at least) loss-of-arms system is implemented. If a bullet hits the side of your ship, it will knock one of the ship’s arms off – if you lose both arms, you can’t throw bombs anymore, but are still alive, and just have to wait for a flying ambulance.
It hasn’t been confirmed for a western release yet, but I’d be incredibly surprised if it doesn’t make it over here, even if it may take some time. It’s set to cost ¥600 over in the land of the rising sun, which would put it at £5.40, €6, or $5.99 over here.
So, are you going to download TwinBee in 3D? And what would you like the remaining two 3D classics to be?
Huh. I never even heard of this game, I might be convinced to try it since it will be brand new to me. Still... why ain't Nintendo releasing teh BIG GUNS, like Metroid or Kid Icarus or Zelda?
Oh well, maybe they figure they already milk those games to death and want to offer something different.
Still, I wouldn't mind seeing Castlevania or Rygar remade in 3-D, something with some sweeping vistas, ya know.
SMDH. They better not pull some crap where they say this service was a failure and stop making 3d "classics" because no one wanted it. Never heard of this game.
I'm not really a fan of the first Twinbee (which I played in Konami's DS arcade compilation). Maybe I should give it another try, but I like Detana!! Twinbee more.
@X-pert74 I didn't even know there WAS a Famicom version of Twinbee. I thought they went straight to Stinger.
Dude, I had to keep myself from trying to shatter your score yesterday. I don't want to spoil the whole game before playing it co-op. But, rest assured, you're going down.
Also, Combat and Warlords are on the service! Exciting! I'll probably pick those up for multiplayer fun, as well. There are some decent games on there now, between all of the Intellivision stuff. Konami seems to be the only company that really brought the arcade heat.
Twinbee is awesome, but Nintendo is really selecting odd games for this series. I'm sad that only six are being made. Punch-Out!! had better be one of the final two.
@Anand Unfortunately there's no online co-op What Game Room has instead is the challenges, where you set a score (or time if you're playing survival) for someone to beat, and then you two (up to 7 people per challenge, I believe) compete with each other to get first place. It would have been nice to have online co-op, but I think this is a cool approach too.
I really like some of the console games that are up in Game Room, even though they're what has attracted a lot of the ire that Game Room has. I played games like H.E.R.O. and Dolphin for the first time through Game Room, and they're really cool.
EDIT: I haven't check out everything that interests me in Game Room yet, but here are some other games aside from those that I really think are cool:
Kabobber (I'm in 3rd place for this game's leaderboards!) Food Fight M.I.A. Missing In Action Hyper Crash (in 4th place on the leaderboards! River Raid Jungler Juno First
Again, another game I have never heard of before. At least a few people here are excited about this game.
BUT.... with the financial troubles Nintendo is going thru, I don't think these obscure titles are the way to go.
I could be wrong, but I think all the money they are sinking into these games to make them 3D, Nintendo would have been better off using that money to bring 3 certain games to North America for the Wii. Those games would bring in more revenue for Nintendo than these so-called classics being remade in 3D.
Surely TwinBee is the only obscure game they've announced, so far. Xevious and Excitebike are both well known classics and Urban Champion, while certainly not a classic, is at least the kind of thing we might expect from Nintendo with the 3D Classics line.
I mean, sure, since we know there'll only be 6 games total these seem like odd choices. But it looks like they were experimenting with the practicality of making these 3D versions and they discovered that it wasn't as easy or feasible as they'd hoped. In that respect, the cancellation of the series looks to me to be less about lack of customer interest in the obscure titles and more to do with higher production costs than expected. I mean, we knew the line was cancelled before Xevious had even released here, right? So that's gotta mean that they knew early that it wasn't working out.
I'm sort of like Anand in that I appreciate that they tried this out with lesser known games. I'll probably eventually pick up the whole line.
Twinbee is (or was?) actually hugely popular in Japan. The Famicom game sold over 1 million copies, I believe. It just doesn't have much recognition overseas; probably because of its mostly import-only status. Xevious is also another game that was quite popular in Japan as far as I recall reading. Urban Champion though, I have no idea.
With Urban Champion I'm pretty positive the simplicity was the whole reason they did it. I mean, if you're going to start adapting NES ROMs to 3D, why not start with the simplest game and see if it even works? And if you adapt that game, you might as well sell it.
That's all speculation on my part, but I think there's a certain logic to it.
What Game Room has instead is the challenges, where you set a score (or time if you're playing survival) for someone to beat, and then you two (up to 7 people per challenge, I believe) compete with each other to get first place. It would have been nice to have online co-op, but I think this is a cool approach too.
