Games are everywhere! Even on the Nintendo 3DS eShop, where they're kinda outside the limelight, because who even really looks at that storefront anymore, now that the Switch is out?

The eShop might have had a bad rep in the past, due to the tons of garbage that was on the DS and DSi eShop of yesteryear. No more! The 3DS eShop has a ton of hidden gems, like Mamotte Knight 2 aka. Gotta Protectors. This game is a sequel to Protect Me Knight, which was on the even more obscure platform for publishing games: the Xbox 360 indie section. Both games are from Ancient Corp. who are the developers behind Beyond Oasis, the Master System version of Sonic the Hedgehog and a little game called Streets of Rage 2. Because of this, you get an excellent chiptune track by the legendary Yuzo Koshiro, which simply is the cherry on top of the cake that makes up this retro-style princess-defence game, made by people who actually made these kinds of games in the past.

The objective of the game is simple enough:

• Play alone or in co-op, with a range of characters
• Protect the Princess by building barricades and carrying her around
• Defeat all the monsters
• Craft new weapons and enhance your skills
• Do it all over again

Apart from the above trailer, the game has a ton of Famicom love on the official homepage. Not only does it have a preview section with screenshots that looked like they were taken by a camera off a TV screen, like how we used to capture screenshots in the past, but it also has this manga that seems to be a parody of the Famicom inspired manga at the time, such as Famicom Cap, Famicom Rocky and Famicom Wolf.

Unfortunately the game isn't available in Europe, so I hope everyone will badger AncientGames_JP on Twitter to make them port it to the Switch.

What is available for free for anyone, however, is Gotta Protectors Amazon's Running diet, which you can download off the official homepage. This is a .nes file which means that you can play it in any emulator or load it onto your Retro Freak or Flash Cart of choice.

It's a pretty basic runner, where you gotta pick up the water and avoid the cakes or face world ending consequences! This game is masterfully put together with parallax scrolling and big sprites, which means that it's a 10/10 by 1980's standard (back when people thought Shadow of the Beast was a good game) and the Amazon is currently making the rounds on YouTube and social media.

In the current gaming climate, where so many games come out every day and it's hard to get noticed, I think making a small free game like this is a legitimately cool tactic to drum up awareness of your game... Even more than a demo. Here's a trailer for the game. Why not download it and give it a go and then go check out Gotta Protectors!