hanabiThe Hanabi Festival is a great way for gamers from different regions to experience titles that were never released locally, or only ever received a very limited release outside of Japan. Previous games released as part of Hanabi Week celebrations include Mario’s Super Picross, Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels and the Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.

The festival is back this week in the Wii Shop Channel, so you’d better grab some Nintendo Points and start waggling your remote!

Virtual Console

Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen (900 points)
With only 25,000 copies distributed in North America, Ogre Battle is renowned as one of the rarest video games ever released, as well as being one of the most critically acclaimed.

Ogre Battle is a strategy RPG title, originally released for the Super Nintendo, that requires players to deploy units in a series of tactical battles. With a whole stack of features, including class selection, unit upgrades and twelve different endings, this is one of those titles that’s capable of eating up your entire weekend.

If you’re looking for a deep and satisfying strategy title to spend your points on, Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen is a fantastic choice.

Pulseman (900 points)
Pulseman is an action platformer for the Sega Mega Drive that was only released in Japan.

The game allegedly has some sort of story, but as with most platformers that takes second place to the action. Pulseman’s special abilities (because what would a platformer be without them) include firing electricity from his hands, as well as transforming into a ball of electricity that can shoot through the levels at high speed.

Pulseman’s character designer, Ken Sugimori, went on to design another title that you may be familiar with, called Pokémon (I think it has something to do with animal cruelty).

WiiWare

Gradius Rebirth (600 points)
WiiWare only gets one game this week, in the form of Gradius Rebirth.

Another unimaginative remake of a classic space-shooter, Gradius Rebirth is available at a surprisingly low price point. Fans of this genre likely can’t get enough side-scrolling mayhem in their lives, but I can’t help but feel that the lack of a two-player mode could hurt sales of this title.

Gradius Rebirth includes online leaderboards, multiple game modes and five different ships to pilot through a series of challenging levels.