Atelier Mysterious

Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey – Mix and Match

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While, as the name suggests, a significant part of Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey is about Firis going on her journey of self-discovery, it is still an Atelier game — and as such you’ll be spending plenty of time crafting items.

Atelier Firis doesn’t completely reinvent the alchemy mechanics from Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book, but it does feature some new twists on the formula established in that game. Once again we have the series’ classic “bung everything in a pot and see what comes out” base combined with some almost puzzle game-esque mechanics — and the result is an enjoyable, satisfying alchemy system.

Get your apron and your stirring stick, then — it’s time to take a closer look.

Continue reading Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey – Mix and Match →

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Super Challenge Baseball

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And you thought we were done with sports games! Nope, there’s a few more… only a few more though, including a couple from Mattel’s “M Network” label, where they ported Intellivision classics to Atari 2600.

Super Challenge Baseball for Atari 2600 is a port of the Intellivision’s Major League Baseball, a game which paid up for the MLB license and then didn’t use any player names, likenesses or team names. You can understand why they dropped the licensing for subsequent rereleases. It’s a two-player only game, so I recruit my long-suffering wife to suffer some more with me.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Retro Select, Videos

Retro Select: Mad Nurse

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Ah, the Spectrum. Legend of the 1980s gaming scene in the UK — and the mortal enemy of Atari fans like myself. Unfortunately, the fact that fanboyism goes all the way back to the earliest days of gaming means that I missed out on a lot of interesting games back in the day — that changes now!

The first of an occasional dalliance in the ZX Spectrum’s library on Retro Select is Mad Nurse, a simple but enjoyable arcade-style game released on Firebird’s £1.99 budget label. It was described as “one of the sickest games ever released” by Computer & Video Games, and involves dead babies. So that’s fun!

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari ST A to Z: Screaming Wings

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Screaming Wings for Atari 8-bit was an excellent clone of Capcom’s arcade classic 1942, complete with loop-the-loops, a Lockheed Lightning under the player’s control and some satisfying gameplay.

Screaming Wings for Atari ST, meanwhile, is probably one of the worst shoot ’em ups on the system, since it abandoned almost everything that made the 8-bit version good and instead produced a steaming pile of pap whose only real redeeming feature is its use of digitised sound effects.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: Zenji

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Zenji for Atari 8-bit is an early Activision game I’d never heard of — I’m surprised, since I thought I’d stumbled across all of their work from the early days of video gaming at one point or another.

I’m doubly surprised, since Zenji is a really good game! It’s a fun puzzler where certain elements will feel familiar to fans of Pipe Mania and its numerous imitators, but with its own distinctive twist that makes it stand out as something truly original.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atelier Mysterious

Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey – Taking a Trip

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cropped-atelier-megafeature-header-1-8868334This post is one chapter of a MegaFeature!
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Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey isn’t the first time that the Atelier series has attempted to focus on a protagonist going on a long journey. Far from it, in fact.

While the “modern” Atelier games are typically associated with the structure of being based around a “hub” location and then radiating out from there, this style of play only makes up some of the series. Atelier Totori and Atelier Ayesha are both explicitly about going on a journey, while Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana, Atelier Iris 2: The Azoth of Destiny, Atelier Meruru and Atelier Shallie all have a significant “journey” component to their narratives, even if they also feature a “hub” location to call home.

But Atelier Firis manages to be a bit different by virtue of the way that it is constructed. Its “open world” nature gives a very different feel to the protagonist’s journey — and makes it stand out amid its peers in a very interesting and positive way. So let’s take a closer look at this idea.

Continue reading Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey – Taking a Trip →

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Super Breakout

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Yep, here we are again with Super Breakout, this time for Atari 5200. This was the pack-in game for the system for quite some time, and left a fair few people rather underwhelmed — the system was certainly capable of better.

That said, it’s still a competent enough version of Super Breakout, and comes complete with all the different ways to play you’d expect from that game. There are certainly far worse ways to spend your time with your Atari 5200!

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Retro Select, Videos

Retro Select: Deep Water

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The Simple 2000 series for PlayStation 2 remains a continual source of fascination for me — particular as a surprising number of these odd games made it west via 505 GameStreet.

Deep Water, also known as The Daikaijuu, is an open-world game about pootling around in your boat blasting sharks and cannon-toting pirates. Supposedly there are also sea monsters, too, but I couldn’t figure out how to find them…

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari ST A to Z: Renaissance

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Sometimes, the concept of something is sound, but the execution is disastrous. Such is the case with Impressions’ Renaissance, ostensibly a collection of classic arcade games with “enhanced” contemporary versions.

Unfortunately, an absolute mass of broken promises set by both the packaging and the manual makes this an enormously disappointing package that, quite rightly, still makes people surprisingly but understandably furious to this day.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: XPoker

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When contemplating video game history, an important side of things that often gets overlooked or ignored is the public domain sector.

Here, programmers would put together often very good pieces of software, release them into the wild for free and be perfectly happy for people to distribute them as they saw fit. Such is the case with this week’s game XPoker, which was originally released via a bulletin board system, and subsequently found itself getting into the hands of all sorts of people.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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The best of overlooked and underappreciated computer and video games, from yesterday and today.