Evercade, Mega Drive, NES, Piko Interactive Collection 1

The Immortal: How To Kill Your Wizard

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If you are a glutton for punishment, or just feel that modern video games are a touch on the easy and/or fair side for you, it’s high time you checked out Will Harvey’s classic 1990 title, The Immortal.

As it happens, at the time of writing it’s just become easily accessible in not one, but two different places: you can now play the NES version as part of a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, and the Mega Drive version appears as part of the Piko Interactive Collection 1 cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming system.

It’s the latter version we’ll be focusing on today, but expect similar amounts of death in both. Roll up your sleeves, and let’s get mortal.

Continue reading The Immortal: How To Kill Your Wizard →

Videos

Atari A to Z: Yogi’s Great Escape

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Yogi Bear is, it is said, smarter than the average bear. He was certainly smart enough to find himself in several licensed games for a variety of home computer platforms in the early ’90s.

Here’s the Atari 8-bit version of Yogi’s Great Escape, a platform game that we’ve previously seen on the Atari ST A to Z series already. While technically inferior, the 8-bit version actually plays quite a bit better, with tight controls and clear mechanics that make it surprisingly enjoyable to play.

Enjoy the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more.

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Announcements, Community

Around the Network

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Hello friends, and welcome to another week of battling off the Deadly Virus by sitting around at home playing video games.

I’m a little late on this again, I know, but I had a busy weekend — Saturday was taken up with socialisation (well, to a mild degree — my wife had some friends over and I occasionally slipped out to say hello and eat barbecue between Castlevania sessions) and Sunday was all video-making. It’s all done and dusted now, though, leaving me free to 1) finish Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy and 2) write!

So, with that in mind, let’s take a moment to see what you might have missed in the last week or so.

Continue reading Around the Network →

Evercade, Mega Cat Studios Collection 1

Super Painter: Simpler Times

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The platform game genre has been around for many years at this point, and, like most other types of games, it has gradually increased in complexity as time has passed.

That hasn’t always been for the better, however. While the shift to 3D with titles such as Super Mario 64 was praised as a huge leap forwards for gaming as a medium, as time continued to tick onwards, a lot of developers felt the need to continually increase the things a player had to think about while they were playing. Eventually we ended up with Rare’s Donkey Kong 64, a game that, while not bad as such, had diluted the simple pleasures of the genre so much with its myriad collectibles that a lot of people bounced right off it.

So sometimes it’s nice to return to simpler times. Times when platform games unfolded on a single screen at a time, and required you to do nothing more than reach a particular point, collect all the things on screen or, perhaps, paint every inch of the level in a particular colour. Enter Super Painter from Retro Souls, part of the Mega Cat Studios Collection cartridge for the Evercade retro gaming platform.

Continue reading Super Painter: Simpler Times →

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: International Soccer

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It’s time for another sports game! Hooray, hoorah, hooroo!

This time around, we’re looking at International Soccer for Atari 2600, which is one of Mattel’s numerous M Network cartridges. If you’ve not come across these before, these were ports of games from Mattel’s Intellivision console, often scaled down a little bit to fit the limited hardware of the Atari 2600.

International Soccer is based on the officially licensed NASL Soccer for Intellivision, and it’s a game for the very patient retro gamer. Find out more in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atelier

Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy – Doing New Game Plus Right

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cropped-atelier-megafeature-header-1-8868334This post is one chapter of a MegaFeature!
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Once you beat Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy once, you could quite feasibly leave it behind and feel like you’ve had a good experience. You’ll have enjoyed a 40-50 hour RPG, and you’ll have seen the story wrap up in a satisfactory manner.

It doesn’t have to end there, though. There’s a second protagonist to play through as, and while that protagonist passes through the same dungeons as the first over the course of the game, their core narrative is completely different and they have a whole other supporting cast — and, this being an Atelier game, they have their own unique items to craft, too.

For some people, being asked to play through a whole RPG again is a hard sell, though — even if said replay offers mostly new experiences. How can you convince people to keep playing after the credits have rolled for the first time? Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy provides a great example of how a good New Game Plus mode can keep players engaged in the long term without feeling like you’re retreading old ground.

Continue reading Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy – Doing New Game Plus Right →

Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy Marathon, Videos

Final Fantasy Marathon: Barrier Shift – Final Fantasy III #8

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We’ve almost reached the first big milestone in Final Fantasy III’s main scenario!

But before we descend to the “world below” and discover what’s really going on, we have a major challenge standing in our way. Can we free King Argus and his subjects from the evil Hein — who regularly shifts his weak point, if no-one told you — and return peace to the Floating Continent?

Only one way to find out. Enjoy the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

Evercade, Interplay Collection 2, Puzzlers, SNES

The Brainies: Furry Balls

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As we’ve seen a number of times already at this point, Blaze’s Evercade retro gaming platform is home to a wide variety of obscure titles that many people probably haven’t played — and which certainly haven’t been rereleased many times over the years.

Some great examples can be found on the two Interplay Collection cartridges, which include not only games that are associated with Interplay themselves, but also titles hailing from developers that subsequently ended up under the Interplay umbrella.

Interplay Collection 2, for example, plays host to a rather entertaining puzzle game featuring small, round, furry creatures. Let’s take a closer look at The Brainies, also known in some territories as Tiny Skweeks or The Tinies.

Continue reading The Brainies: Furry Balls →

Videos

Atari ST A to Z: Rana Rama

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Rana Rama is one of those games that most ST owners probably played at some point, since it was distributed as part of the “Super Pack” bundle of software with new STs in 1988. And from there, the rampant piracy of the period meant that the disks of the Super Pack tended to find their way into other people’s hands, too!

It’s an interesting game, though, and had quite an influence on a number of subsequent developers. Notably, its use of “fog of war” to gradually reveal rooms as you enter them inspired Simon Phipps to adopt a similar approach when developing his exploration-centric platformer Switchblade for Core Design.

There’s also some very interesting mechanics going on under the hood. Watch me try and figure things out in the video below — and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Community, One-Shots

Steam’s Inconsistency is Hurting Visual Novels – How We Can Help

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Update: 05/08/2020

Steam has reinstated Bokuten after investigation confirmed the issue with the missed (and inaccessible) CGs mentioned below. This article remains relevant, however, because Steam’s treatment of MangaGamer in this incident was totally unacceptable. Original article follows.

Steam is the largest, most well-established PC gaming platform out there. For many gamers, “PC gaming” and “Steam” are pretty much synonymous.

To put it another way, in much the same way that Grandma thinks that Facebook is “the Internet”, there are many people out there who don’t look beyond Steam as a place to buy new games. And while there are perfectly valid reasons to favour Steam — its social features are pretty good, its frequent sales make gaming very affordable and it’s where you’ll find the largest communities for many online games — there are certain parts of the industry that are being treated extremely poorly by the platform.

One of those is the localised Japanese visual novel sector, which frequently finds itself the victim of Valve’s seemingly amorphous content policies. So it’s time we looked at what we, as a community, can perhaps do a bit differently.

Continue reading Steam’s Inconsistency is Hurting Visual Novels – How We Can Help →

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