Following on from my article about it, I felt compelled to show the wonder that is G-LOC to all of you.
If you’ve never encountered this game, it’s one of the later Super Scaler games from Sega in the arcades, and until the recent Sega Ages release for Nintendo Switch, it has never had a particularly good conversion to home consoles.
Now though… whoo. You have to tear me away from this damn game. Enjoy the video below, and subscribe on YouTube for more.
Activision may be a company that a lot of gamers like to steer well clear of these days thanks to issues like predatory DLC and microtransactions, but back in the days of the 8-bit micros, they were one of the finest companies out there.
They credited their programmers and designers, they put out games that pushed the boundaries of underpowered hardware such as the Atari 2600… and they just made great games, full stop.
One fantastic example is MegaMania, a thoroughly weird but extremely enjoyable fixed shooter that will get you bobbing and weaving between waves of hamburgers, engagement rings, bow ties and steam irons. No symbolism there, no sir.
Hello everyone, and I hope you’re all still surviving during these strange times in the world.
As you’ve seen, I’m just continuing to beaver away on stuff here just as I’ve always done, so it’s business as usual here on MoeGamer. I hope I’m at least providing some entertaining and informative reads and watches to take your mind off things right now!
Let’s check out what you might have missed in the last week or so.
Yep, it’s Final Legacy again — this time for the very final time, I promise!
Final Legacy’s unreleased Atari 5200 conversion forms part of the Atari Flashback Classics compilation, and thus it wouldn’t be right and proper to pass it by without appropriate acknowledgement, now, would it?
Thankfully, it’s pretty much identical to the excellent Atari 8-bit version, as opposed to Paradox Software’s dodgy, janky port for Atari ST. Once again we cast ourselves into hostile waters in an attempt to save the surviving human race from nuclear catastrophe.
With Final Fantasy II down for the count, it’s time to move on… to Final Fantasy II’s postgame story, originally added in the Game Boy Advance version.
Soul of Rebirth, as it is called, casts you in the role of all the characters who died in the main narrative, and invites you to check out what they’re getting up to in the afterlife. And, indeed, to discover that one can still get one’s ass well and truly kicked even if one is already dead.
Soul of Rebirth is hard. But we’re not giving up, no siree — we’re seeing this thing through to its conclusion, however long it takes!
Final Legacy is a great game on Atari 8-bit, as we’ve previously seen. And, as we’ll see shortly, it could have been a great game on Atari 5200, too.
On the Atari ST, meanwhile… hmm. Not so hot. The problem in this case was the outfit doing the porting: Paradox Software, who were best known for putting out fairly mediocre fare at best, but who I can only assume were cheap to hire.
Final Legacy for Atari ST isn’t atrocious by any means… but if you have access to some means of playing either the 8-bit or 5200 version, there’s little reason to bother with this. But come check it out with me anyway, and admire quite how much worse Paradox made this version over the original!
In today’s short;Play, we take a look at a Nintendo Switch-exclusive arcade puzzle game with a gorgeous ’80s-style aesthetic.
Cyber Protocol from RedDeerGames is a game where you’re attempting to save an android’s life. You do this by negotiating a series of perilous mazes, attempting to grab as many dots and bonus items as you can along the way.
If this all sounds a bit Pac-Man, you’d be right to an extent… but it’s the interesting additional twists on the formula — plus a rather different core movement mechanic — that make things truly interesting here.
Watch the video below, or subscribe on YouTube.
Wouldn’t you know it? A comet has hit the Earth, bathing the entire planet in deadly radiation that, apparently, we will have developed a “vaccine” against by the late 21st century.
Naturally, rather than attempting to organise some sort of large-scale relief effort to distribute this life-saving vaccine to the world’s population, the only possible solution to this disastrous situation is to send one dude in a machine gun-equipped car across the world and hope he knows how to assemble a rocket at the far end of his journey.
Oh, did I not mention the rocket? There’s a rocket to assemble, too. And launch codes to discover. But mostly a lot of driving and blasting anything unfortunate enough to get in your way on the road…
Today, we beat Final Fantasy II once and for all! Well, apart from the Soul of Rebirth story added in the GBA version, of course, but we’ll deal with that when we come to it.
We have a couple of significant obstacles in our path though: the Jade Passage and Pandaemonium dungeons! The latter in particular is quite easy to get lost in, as I find out to my great cost… but it does at least have some rather tasty treasure to enjoy if you happen to stumble across it.
Pack a lunch, sit down and enjoy, as we take the fight to the Emperor and attempt to save the world from invasion by Hell itself!
Back in the early days of home computing, you couldn’t rely on arcade game companies to provide official ports of their own games.
Nope; they tended to be farmed out to other publishers and developers who had more experience with working on the 8- and 16-bit platforms of the era. One such example of this was the relationship between Sega and Activision; this resulted in a number of Sega arcade classics getting ported to systems like the Atari ST.
Here’s Enduro Racer, one of several products of this partnership. Can the humble ST stand up to the might of this Super Scaler classic?
