NES

Is Culture Brain’s Flying Warriors the holy grail of martial-arts curios or a dusty footnote squeezed between Ninja Gaiden II and that unloved copy of Karate Champ your cousin pawned off on you? (Rhetorical, naturally the answer is “yes” to both, plus an extra scoop of what-the-heck.) From afar it masquerades as a stock 8-bit brawler: punch, kick, platform, repeat. Then it […]

How often does an 8-bit run-and-gun let you Tokyo-drift a jeep, scoop up POWs like bonus coins, and upgrade your grenade launcher into a screen-shredding missile hurricane, all while a Sousa-meets-Saturday-morning anthem blares out of the triangle channel? (Rhetorical, of course: the answer is exactly once.) Jackal, Konami’s 1988 NES conversion of its 1986 arcade cabinet, sits in that odd