Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II (1994) brought back Mike Jones for a time-traveling adventure, hurling him across history to collect magic tablets and face the returning villain Zoda.

The premise is a good excuse for variety. Mike is pulled out of his own time and dropped into ancient Egypt, King Arthur's England, the Wild West, prehistory and Leonardo da Vinci's Italy, meeting a version of each and collecting a tablet before moving on. Instead of the first game's single yo-yo, he picks up a weapon appropriate to wherever he's landed, so the combat changes character with the setting.

Mechanically it keeps what worked. The grid-based dungeon movement is back, with the sinking tiles and the exact-square jumps, and the puzzles are more elaborate than the first game's now that Nintendo had worked out what the system could do.

The reason almost nobody played it is timing. This is a 1994 NES release. The SNES was three years old, the PlayStation was months away in Japan, and shelf space for 8-bit cartridges had effectively vanished. Nintendo put it out in tiny numbers with almost no marketing, which is why it's both easy to miss and relatively pricey to buy now.

That makes it a neat curio: a polished continuation of a cult original, released so far out of its own era that it barely registered. Play the two back to back and the sequel is clearly the better-built game. It just arrived at a party that had ended.

A charming, overlooked coda to the NES story, and the last of Nintendo's own games on the console.