Gimmick!

When a Japanese cartridge contains its own sound chip, you know the creators meant business. Gimmick! is Sunsoft's swan song on the NES and at the same time one of the most refined technical gems of the entire eight-bit era — a game that looks and sounds as if it mistook which generation it belonged to.

A visually adorable title in which you control the green creature Yumetaró, it hides a surprisingly deep and challenging game beneath its sugary shell. The central mechanic is a star the hero conjures above his head and throws — except this star obeys advanced physics. It bounces off walls, you can keep it in the air, ride it like a platform and combine jumps so it carries you to places you otherwise couldn't reach. Mastering these physics separates ordinary players from masters.

And then there is the sound. The Japanese version of the cartridge contained a special FME-7 sound chip, thanks to which the game has one of the best and richest soundtracks ever heard on the NES. The tracks have a depth and melodiousness that simply outgrows the possibilities of the standard hardware.

Gimmick! is, however, also seriously tough and rare. It came out late and only in Japan (and to a limited extent in Scandinavia), so the original is a collector's rarity today. All the more is the game revered by connoisseurs, who see in it a perfect example of what an experienced studio could squeeze out of the NES when it cared neither for budget nor for the market.

Thanks to modern remaster releases Gimmick! is fortunately no longer the privilege of a handful of collectors — it has reached a wider audience that can finally appreciate its physics, its music and its unexpected difficulty.

Why play: An adorable but hard platformer with genius star physics and one of the best NES soundtracks — a technical peak of the era, now available outside the collector's vaults too.