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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Kirby drives VC Friday update

With golf game. See.

Super Nintendo golf game Kirby's Dream Course and TurboGrafx-16 side-scroller Bloody Wolf are this week's Virtual Console releases.

Although Mario's dabbling in sandtraps is perhaps better known, Kirby's no slouch on the links, as he proved in 1995 when Dream Course wasn't roundly kicked off the first tee and then beaten up in the car park.

He was helped in this escape act by the fact he wasn't on the tee for long, since - in time-honoured Kirby tradition - the blob himself was the ball. You'd set power, angle and spin and then smack enemies one by one, until the last one turns into a hole.

There were 64 "courses" to complete, according to good old Nintendo, and if you want to see how it holds up today you'll need to throw down 800 Wii points. Or you could wait for Dan's weekly Virtual Console Roundup to help make your mind up.

The alternative, at 600 Wii points, is a game that we're reliably informed [surely "that Wikipedia says" -Ed] was released under the name "Battle Rangers" in Europe. Cue literally nobody in the audience going "aha".

The set-up sounds familiar: a pair of commandos with multidirectional attacks dash around taking on an entire army. Nintendo says the VC version features eight scenarios to tackle.

All of which brings us up to 103 titles on Virtual Console in Europe. What will be number 104? Find out this time next week. Squiggly-line-mouth-smiley.