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Sonic 2 on US Virtual Console

Along with two friends.

This week's additions to the American Virtual Console which you probably can't access anyway are Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Golden Axe II and Lode Runner.

Sonic 2 (Megadrive, 800 Wii points) sees the little blue fellow darting from left to right in massive, multi-path 2D platform levels in pursuit of Dr. Eggman/Robotnik/whatever - and putting pay to whatever it is he's doing with the Chaos Emeralds. It introduces Tails, but don't hold that against it.

Also from the Megadrive cupboard comes Golden Axe II, which also-also sees players marching left to right in the fearless boots of a barbarian, a dwarf or an Amazon warrior "sorting out" various enemies we can't for the life of us remember and joining up for a bit of head-to-head two-player when the going gets Game-Over.

Finally, Lode Runner (NES, 500 Wii points) is about collecting nuggets across increasingly challenging 2D puzzles, and the NES version features an Edit Mode for making your own levels. It's actually the second game in the series to appear on Virtual Console, following Battle Lode Runner (TurboGrafx-16, 600 Wii points), which was released in late April.

However, none of the three above have been released on the European service. Will one of them become this Friday's 100th addition to the European Virtual Console? We don't know. If we had to speculate, we'd phone in sick.

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