Blink and you’ll miss it – you stop paying attention to fangames for just a couple of days, and a whole community convention is held behind your back! The Nintendo Community Fangame Convention this year saw a whole raft of great freeware games released. While you can see the whole list of entrants on the NCFC site, here’s a few choice highlights, encompassing both complete titles and demos. There’s some really impressive games on show here, well worth your bandwidth and time:

Project AM2R – Demo

Still in development, this hugely ambitious project to completely reimagine the Gameboy-only Metroid 2 in the style of the more recent Metroid: Zero Mission has already wowed audiences with a standalone ‘tech demo’ release. This new demo, released for the NCFC, is the first playable excerpt of the finished game to be made available to the public, giving you the entire first region of the game to explore. As you can see from the trailer, this is a cut above, effectively being a full, new game based around the old concept. I’m very eagerly anticipating the release of the final product, which is apparently close to completion now.

Xeno Fighters R – Version 0.11

Another work-in-progress, but this one is best described as a beta version, with more than enough content to consider it a full game. A vertically scrolling shooter in the style of Raiden, 20+ flying heroes from several generations of shooters (ranging from Parodius to The Guardian Legend and more) team up to take down a variety of interdimensonal baddies. Despite the chaotic ‘mashup’ nature of the design, this is quite tightly designed, and well worth a play if you like the genre.

Psycho Waluigi – Complete Game

Probably the star of the show this year, Psycho Waluigi has been in development for a while, but the final version was released to no shortage of praise at NCFC. After falling out of his hot air balloon and landing on his head, Luigi’s villainous doppelganger, Waluigi, is transported to the land of Unconcia, where he finds that he has developed awesome psychic powers. Being the caddish sort, he immediately set out to conquer the world, usurping the many kings of the land by picking up and throwing stuff with his mind, and using his powers to steal the abilities from the local creatures. It’s a fun, creative and fresh take on Mario-style platforming, and well worth the download.

Pokemon Mystery Universe – MMORPG

One of the more ambitious projects to come out of the Nintendo fangame scene in recent years, Pokemon Mystery Universe is a fan-made online multiplayer take on the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series, a much-maligned spinoff franchise that puts the iconic fighting critters into a randomly generated roguelike-lite scenario. PMU was released quite some time ago, but a major update was released to coincide with NCFC. Essentially, it’s the same core game as the handheld dungeon-crawler series, but in realtime, allowing up to four players to cooperate in their quest to level up, recruit new monsters and hoard loot.

While these are my personal picks – especially Psycho Waluigi, which is a ton of fun – this is just a few out of the dozens of NCFC entrants this year, so there’s plenty more to dig into. Have a look, play a few, and post your thoughts and favourites in the comments box below. That’s what it’s for, after all.

[Nintendo Community Fangame Convention]