Little Samson

Little Samson is the best NES game almost nobody played, and it is late enough that almost no one had a reason to. It shipped in 1992, after the Super Nintendo had already taken the market, and its print run was small enough that the cartridge is now one of the most expensive on the system.

What is on the cartridge explains the reputation. You have four playable characters and can swap between them at any point in a stage, and each one plays a completely different game. Samson is the balanced one, who can climb walls and throw a bell. The dragon flies and shoots fire but dies in one hit. The mouse is tiny, crawls through gaps nobody else fits through, and fires a weak ranged shot. The golem is huge, slow, walks through spikes, hits like a truck and has double the health. Every stage is designed so that one of them is clearly the right answer at each point, which turns the game into a running decision. Takeru built the engine around large, brightly drawn sprites and a real soundtrack, and the result looks like a first-year 16-bit game on 8-bit hardware.

• ▸Four playable characters, swappable mid-stage, each with its own physics
• ▸The golem is immune to spikes; the mouse fits through gaps nobody else can
• ▸One-hit deaths for the dragon against double health for the golem
• ▸Large, colourful sprites and a soundtrack beyond the usual NES standard