🛹🪨🪓 WONDER BOY ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION Nintendo Switch Review 7/10 "Get Good At Skateboarding & Axe Throwing" 🛹🪨🪓 @ININ_Games #Retrogaming

My Wonderboy is Wonder Boy In Monster Land on the SEGA Master System. Wonder Boy has always been an intrinsic part of my video games origin story. I remember the first time that I played a Wonder Boy game was in a Video Rental Shop back in the 80s. There was an original Wonder Boy arcade machine just cosying up in the corner of the store in between a Cardboard cut-out of a Gremlin and a stack of Arnie VHS tapes. My overriding memory of playing that arcade game was that it felt quite tough to control and that the skateboard pick-up item was a pain in the arse.

Fast Forward a few months and I would again encounter Wonder Boy but this time it was at my cousin's house when I went round there for a day of football and video games. When I walked into the front room at his house he had set up his Commodore 64 for the first time and was loading Wonder Boy. I was gobsmacked! The same Arcade game that was in the video shop was now in his front room. After playing it relentlessly for hours on end I came to the same conclusion, the Skateboard is a pain in the derrière.

Eventually, I found my way to Wonder Boy In Monster Land on my beloved SEGA Master System as it was the first game that I bought on my brand new SMS. For me Wonder Boy In Monster Land felt like my first real adventure in video games as it gave me choices and an in-game economy that had me hooked. It felt like there were secrets just begging to be found throughout the game and I was totally on board with this. Even better, there wasn't a skateboard in sight!

The Wonderboy games beyond Monster Land were games I didn't play until much more recently as the remakes of Wonder III Dragon's Trap and Asha In Monster World have come out in the last few years. These remakes were a breath of fresh air and I really enjoyed my time with them as you will see from the articles on the website:

https://www.gamesfreezer.co.uk/2017/04/ten-minute-taster-wonder-boy-dragons.html

https://www.gamesfreezer.co.uk/2021/06/wonder-boy-asha-in-monster-world-ps4.html

When the Wonder Boy Collection landed in my inbox I was extremely excited to see what lay in waiting for me as went back to the originals from my childhood. Basically, you get exactly what you might expect from the digital version which I took a look at. You get the Arcade version of Wonder Boy (without the Gremlins Cardboard Cut Out and without the Arnie VHS tapes). You get the Arcade version of Monster Land which I had never played before as I have only ever played the SEGA Master System Version. You also get the Monster World and Monster IV Mega Drive / Genesis ports.

Beyond the actual games themselves, you get the standard level of additional features such as:

• Filter and shader options
• Rewind facility
• Save states option
• Wonder Boy Art gallery

Obviously, this game is for Wonder Boy lovers and that is exactly what you are going to be buying this for but my only reservation with the digital version is that the extras are extremely limited as the art gallery for me doesn't go deep enough to giving us some Wonder Boy history. It's a shame really as there is plenty of game dev back story that goes with the series that could have been leveraged into a fully-fledged digital booklet that could have given us the potted history of the Wonder Boy franchise rather than just placing the various JPGs into a menu within the game. 

Saying that I really did get a nostalgia blast from flicking through the SEGA Master System Manual from Monster Land that was included within the artwork. It's a shame that we couldn't have got scans included from all of the manuals and maybe the flyers from the arcade versions.

"Right I'm off to perfect my skateboarding skills versus snails and rocks"

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