Wagyan Land

Wagyan Land (ワギャンランド) is a platform game originally developed by Now Production for the Famicom, and published by Namco in 1989. The Famicom version was re-released on the Virtual Console on September 2008 for the Wii and on May 7, 2014 for the Wii U.

The game, and series it spawned, stars Wagyan, a mysterious creature resembling a green mechanical dinosaur who must protect his homeland of Wagyan Land from the mad scientist Dr. Devil. The games features standard side-scrolling stages where the player must reach the goal, as well as boss encounter where the player must compete in a mini-game of shiritori (しりとり). Shiritori (しりとり) is a Japanese word game in which the players are required to say a word which begins with the final kana of the previous word.

The objective of the game is to reach the end of each action scene by making the best use of Wagyan's sound wave attacks and jumping ability. The player must confront a boss at the end of certain stages, but instead of actually fighting the boss in battle, the player is challenged to a mini-game where they must score more points than their opponent. The graphics in this installment featured simple backgrounds with bright colors.

The Game Gear version of the Wagan Land is different from the Famicom version and the plot involves Wagan Land being attacked by Dr. Devil once again. In order to avoid the afterimage effect that was caused by playing action games on an LCD game at the time of the game's release, some of the stages were redesigned and others were replaced. New power-up items for the action scenes were also added that were previously introduced in Wagan Land 2 (which was released prior to the Game Gear version), as well as an hourglass that stops time during the mini-game segments. The Game Gear version lacks the ability of allowing the player to slowly descend into the ground by pressing the jump button while in mid-air, a features that has been included in the other games of the series.