Exerion 2

Exerion 2, the unreleased NES sequel to Jaleco's 1983 Arcade game got itself a dump the other day. Unfortunately it was polluted with NintendoAGE watermarks, so this is X-CulT's version that took some of them out. As you can see it's not a perfect fix, unless you want to believe Jaleco produced this game this year, but it's here, and is playable.

What's the difference between this and its prequel? Not a lot. It changes a few graphics and alters the duel shot a bit, but aside from that its generally the same game with some very minor improvements. My problem with Exerion is just how badly the NES version has aged. Exerion's selling point, the "parallax backgrounds" look hideous by today's standards, and those backgrounds were the only thing stopping the game from being classified as a generic shoot-em up. Sure they were early games, but the NES could have been pushed to give us better than solid green grass. By the time Exerion 2 would have been released it would have been in direct competition with Konami's first Gradius game, and that's not a battle that even the Arcade version had much chance of winning. On the plus side though, at least the first game looks good on the SG-1000.

This isn't much of a sequel so it's somewhat obvious why it was scrapped, but nevertheless interesting to see it had a sibling at some point, and who can say "no" to an unreleased title?