Little Samson on NES asks how much you’ll pay for a gem
destructoid.comI have a number of valuable games in my collection. Some I acquired through lucky timing, others I’ve actually shelled out for, but all of them are the result of questionable priorities. None are as valuable as my copy of Little Samson.
As of today, Little Samson is worth more than two months of rent for my small, one-bedroom apartment in a nowhere town. That’s really depressing because it both illustrates how ridiculous the collectors market is for video games and how ridiculously expensive it is just to afford a roof over my head for a fraction of a year.
But I don’t collect games to pretend I have some sort of valuable asset. I collect them to play and appreciate. And to demonstrate this, I put Little Samson in my NES. Then I kind of wiggled it around a bit to get it to display properly because I really need to replace my console’s pin connector.
Little Samson comes to us from Takeru, also known as Sur de Wave. The company was pretty short-lived, which is a massive shame. In total, they only did about four games, and Little Samson is the only one that came stateside.
It’s hard to find much information about Takeru, but another game they made for the Famicom, Cocoron, was helmed by Mega Man creator Akira Kitamura. As for Little Samson, the director here was Shinichi Yoshimoto, who was one of the designers of Ghouls ‘n Ghosts. Real Capcom royalty.
Given the company’s pedigree, it may be unsurprising that Little Samson is a good game. Perhaps not the maximum utmost, but it is Duck Tales good. It’s Super Mario Bros. 2 (US) good. Beyond that, it’s an impressive game for the NES. The graphics are solid, and the character animation has an anomalous level of detail. The characters move with a fluidity that seems almost impossible on the console. It flaunts it, too, with Samson doing a full twirl in the air every time he jumps. It’s practically excessive.
From the outset, Little Samson gives the impression of heavy Mega Man influence. The game opens by allowing you to
Read more on destructoid.com
