Welcome to VC Weekly, N-Europe's guide to the wonderful world of Nintendo's download service. Written by Sam C Gittins.

Anyway enough from me and on with the game!

Available for download this week we have...

• Aero the Acro-bat

Points: 800
Publisher: Sunsoft
Developer: Iguana
Released: 1993
System: SNES

During the nineties many mascot characters were created to try and topple the likes of Mario and Sonic and while some enjoyed some short-lived success others simply tried and failed. Aero falls somewhere in the middle as while the first game was moderately successful it still wasn't all that it could have been, read on to find out why.

As you'll already have guessed you take on the role of Aero the Acro-bat and use his circus skills to run and jump through various levels that have you bouncing off trampolines, swinging on trapezes and swooping through burning hoops not to mention diving into precariously placed pools.

You'd be forgiven for initially thinking that this sounds like a relatively simple platform game but it's unnecessarily overcomplicated due to the fact that not only are you given specific objectives to clear on each level such as jumping through every hoop but you're also timed, have enemies and traps to contend with plus awkward level design which is less than intuitive to say the very least. So what will often happen is that you'll reach the end of the level only to find you missed an objective and even then that's when you're lucky enough to have made it that far.

Enemies may only take off one bar of your health per hit but they can be annoyingly awkward to defeat, especially when you fail to hit them and then get knocked into another obstacle such as spikes which are basically and instant kill. Now yes the presentation is fairly nice and the accompanying music is all very fitting and jolly but when a game is frustrating to play these features can only redeem the game to a certain degree.

If you happen to be a fan of Sunsoft's games then you may want to pick this up or even if you simply need a platform game fix but otherwise you'd be wise to wait for the far superior sequel which fixes many problems from this release and is a lot better for it. In the meantime if you're looking for an alternative why not pick up one of the many decent platform titles that are already available on the VC as you'll quite honestly get more value for your points.

Verdict : Aero is an annoyingly average title.

That's it for another installment of VC Weekly which will return again soon. So until then, enjoy the rest of the week and Game On!

Sam Gittins
[email protected]

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