Having beaten the game last week, today it’s time to start a whole new Warriors All-Stars adventure!
This time around, we’re taking Sophie from Atelier Sophie as our leading lady, which puts us into Tamaki’s story route rather that Setsuna’s, which we explored last time around.
This should mean we get the opportunity to encounter and recruit some different characters and see some brand new story scenes… as well as getting to throw Punis at people. What’s not to like?
You know a game’s on to a winner when you think “ah, I’ll just sit down and have a quick play on this to take some screenshots” and then suddenly it’s over an hour later. Such was the case with Strikers 1945 for me today.
Part of the excellent value (and beautifully packaged) Psikyo Shooting Stars Alpha compilation from NIS America and City Connection, Strikers 1945 originally hails from 1995, and was the fourth game that shoot ’em up specialists Psikyo put out for the world to enjoy.
Blending real-world aircraft with ridiculous, fantastic elements, Strikers 1945 is a straightforward but extremely solid and accessible shooter that remains well worth playing even today. Let’s take a closer look.
Continue reading Strikers 1945: Not Quite How the History Books Told It
With apologies to Senran Kagura Peach Ball for shamelessly stealing its Dad joke-tier ninja pun, it’s time to look at another in Sega’s excellent Sega Ages series for Nintendo Switch.
This time around, it’s 1987’s Shinobi, an important game from the relatively early days of Sega’s video gaming portfolio, and a title that doesn’t seem to get talked about all that often these days.
Hailing from the height of the “ninja boom” of the 1980s — a popular culture phenomenon that is regarded to have kicked off with Menahem Golan’s 1981 movie Enter the Ninja — Shinobi remains a solid, challenging game today, and well worth revisiting.
Continue reading Sega Ages Shinobi: Rescue Those Kids? Shuriken!
One cannot talk about the Atari 2600 — or the Atari Video Computer System, as it was originally known — without mentioning Combat.
The original deathmatch, one of the original competitive multiplayer titles and a game that is still an absolute ton of fun to play today — Combat really is an all-time classic, with the only sticking point for a lot of people being the fact that it’s a two-player only affair, so you need another person readily available to get the most out of it.
Fortunately, I have a very understanding, supportive and helpful wife, so let’s get right to the blasting!
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
This post is one chapter of a MegaFeature!
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Now we’ve explored how Atelier Iris handles the series’ core concept of using alchemy and other crafting techniques to create items, it’s time to look at the other aspects of the game.
While all of the previous Atelier games featured strong RPG-style elements such as combat and exploration, for the most part — fourth game Atelier Judie was an exception to a certain extent — these were expressed in the abstract, with the emphasis being placed firmly on the main character and their workshop. That’s where the name came from, after all.
Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana seemingly saw the series take a bit of a sidestep into more traditional RPG territory. But there are a lot of things about it that make it stand out from what you might traditionally think of as a turn-based, menu-driven console RPG. So that’s what we’re going to look at in the next couple of articles.
Continue reading Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana – The Craft of Combat
Most people with a passing awareness of Final Fantasy will know about the series’ recurring elements: chocobos, Cid, the various summons. However, there are a couple of things that crop up slightly less frequently, but still more than once.
One of those things is a location called Mysidia, which, on the few occasions it puts in an appearance in the series — starting with this installment — is inevitably a small settlement populated exclusively by mages. It’s typically the centre of mysterious happenings or magical doodahs, and in this case marks an important stop on the way to retrieve the Ultima Tome.
Today Firion and crew reach Mysidia, go for a little wander, then come back again because, as it turns out, they forgot something. Whoops!
Today’s game hails from the relatively early days of what would go on to become an incredibly popular genre worldwide: the RPG.
Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress is often regarded as the “black sheep” of the Ultima series, but it nicely demonstrates how things worked for this type of game back in the Good Old Days… as well as makes me realise that I really had no need to feel intimidated by the supposed complexity of RPGs back when I was a kid!
The ST version perhaps isn’t the most visually impressive game you’ll see on the platform, but it does make good use of the GEM interface, and provides some solid, enjoyable adventuring action!
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
Japanese artist ryokuchamichi, also known as Green Tea Area, leads a double life.
Not only do they draw rather lovely ecchi art with a particular focus on squishy plump girls and silky sheer hosiery (see their somewhat NSFW Twitter), they also have a talent for paying homage to the classic 8-bit home console era with their own original games.
At the time of writing, we’ve already seen the SameGame-inspired endless puzzler Dig Dig Mine; now, get ready for DEPA★PAKU, a platformer that feels even more like a lost NES title.
And so, we reach the conclusion of our Warriors All-Stars adventure. Or, well, the first conclusion, anyway; this is a game with multiple endings, and a variety of paths through its overall narrative.
The ending we achieve today is not the “true” ending, but it forms a suitable conclusion to the narrative path we’ve been following. Plus you get to see some absolutely disastrous attempts at a “one-hit kill” mission; things get real messy for poor old Honoka for a while there.
This may be the end of our first playthrough of Warriors All-Stars but we’re far from done yet! There are more characters to unlock and play as, more narrative paths to explore and more hot furries to lust over. Fight. I meant fight.
This post is one chapter of a MegaFeature!
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Despite being the sixth game in the series, Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana was the first to come West.
The exact reasoning behind this isn’t entirely clear, but it may be something to do with the fact that the early Atelier games were primarily abstract management simulations with RPG elements, while Atelier Iris unfolds in a manner much more like what the Western audience would have understood “an RPG” to be in 2005.
Perhaps it was assumed the West wasn’t ready for that sort of thing. Perhaps the amount of text in the earlier games made them impractical to localise at the time. Or perhaps they just sort of fell through the cracks. Whatever the reasoning, Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana was the West’s first Atelier game, so that’s where we begin our journey.
Continue reading Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana – It’s an Alchemy Thing
