Delighted to note that Jeremy Parish has returned with a double-sized Retro Round-Up over at 1UP, enumerating and dissecting the various Wii, Xbox 360, and various other retro console offerings made over the past fortnight or so.

Many bonus points for one of the most succinct, lyrical descriptions of Actraiser I've seen in a while, recommending it for Wii VC along the way: "Genuinely inventive video games are hard to come by -- and apparently they're a hard sell, too, seeing as Enix's ActRaiser never really got a true sequel. It was such a simple idea, too: take the nascent "god sim" genre, a la SimCity, make it fast-paced and action-packed (shooting down monsters who try to capture your villagers), and then bookend each chapter of the game with a Rastan-like platformer."

Parish also makes a good point (referencing Actraiser) on Square Enix's alleged Virtual Console recalcitrancy: "Hopefully this is an indication of the company's intentions for VC rather than that ridiculous official statement a few weeks back about how they don't want to confuse children about how to pay for games or whatever. Fine, hoard your Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games to be rehashed into redundancy, but set free these great niche titles that you're never going to touch again. Downloadable content is the future. And the present, really. Of the past. Er, something like that." Amen to that.