Summer Carnival '92 Recca is one of those games I would have never expected to come stateside. An extremely rare NES game that was made for a gaming festival in Japan from 1992? Fat chance! But here we are, and I got to go hands on with it in Nintendo's Handheld Lounge here at PAX Prime 2013.

Right off the bat, I was already overwhelmed. This is an NES shoot-'em-up that really pushed the system's capabilities, as there are several fast moving sprites on screen at any given moment, all the while raining fire upon your character. It doesn't help that the screen is constantly flickering in order to maintain its sense of speed with all the enemies on screen. I found it hard to keep track of what exactly was going on, and managed to get a Game Over within a minute of each play session. While it was incredibly frustrating to see that screen multiple times, I have to say that actually playing the game was quite an exhilarating affair and was hard to walk away from.

Summer Carnival '92 Recca was released on the European 3DS Virtual Console on August 15, and will be released in North America sometime before the end of the year.