If Shining Force III (the best game ever made) is an amped up, firing on all cylinders, 32-bit rendition of Sega’s classic tactical RPG series, then Shining The Holy Ark is the same thing but for Shining In the Darkness.
Tag Archives: Sega
MiniMoni: Shakatto Tambourine! Dapyon! – Sonic Team’s unlikely PSOne release
When Sega discontinued the Dreamcast in 2001 and officially became a third party publisher, it’s fair to say it rocked my world. I couldn’t remember a time before Sega produced their own consoles and at the relatively young age of 19, I naively assumed they would do so forever. The move to third party publishing was swift and prolific, and in a matter of months their biggest games began to appear across all three major consoles; PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube.
Sonic CD – Gotta go past
One of the most remarkable things about Sonic CD, one of the earliest notable games of the CD-ROM era, is that it actually makes good use of the CD medium. Is this just a broad generalisation that serves as a glib statement with which to open a blog post and transition smoothly into a discussion of what makes Sonic CD one of the coolest and more unusual games in the series? Maybe so! But I do think there’s some truth to it…
Christmas NiGHTS Into Dreams – The gift that keeps giving
Christmas NiGHTS is arguably the most famous Christmas game ever made, so I’ll forego the usual descriptions and get straight to what this special game means to me. I first encountered Christmas NiGHTS on the cover of the first issues of Computer & Video Games I ever bought. Issue 182 came with a free book on the “Complete History of Computer and Video Games”, which was instrumental in developing my love of retro gaming, and the magazine itself contained a Christmas buyers guide that advised the reader on whether to get a Saturn or PlayStation that year, or wait a few months longer and get an N64. The case was so compelling for all three that I would eventually get all of them, although the Saturn would actually be the last, some time around late 1998.
Shining Force: Resurrection Of The Dark Dragon – Forced perspective
It’s an unfortunate twist of fate that the year I discovered my favourite game series was also the year it effectively came to an end. In instantly fell in love with tactical RPG Shining Force III when it released on Saturn in 1998, and after a bit of googling – or did I ask Jeeves? – in the college computer lab, I was thrilled to find out that there were two more, Japan-exclusive chapters, as well as a deep bench of previous games in the series. But this was also the year that Camelot Software Planning, the creators and custodians (but not the copyright holders) of the whole Shining series decided to part ways with Sega to largely work on golf games for Sony and Nintendo. So although there were plenty of Shining games I could go back and play, there was effectively nothing new to look forward to. Well, that’s only partially true…
Popful Mail – Feel good design
If the Mega CD port of Popful Mail is well known for anything in the west, it’s the localisation and voice acting provided by infamous publisher Working Designs. Victor’s Ireland’s penchant for tongue-in-cheek scripts places the US version of Popful Mail in a very specific context when the mere inclusion of voices was a sheer novelty. As nostalgic recollections centre on the fun of the story and characters, they threaten to overshadow the game itself. So how exactly does Popful Mail hold up when you take away its voice? That’s the question I ask myself now having played through the Japanese release of the Mega CD game. Not out of some grand experiment but simply because the US version was a little too expensive for my taste!
Border Break – Sheer mechs appeal
I’ve always been quietly fascinated by Sega’s arcade division. While almost all of the classic game developers of old have dropped out of the arcade business, not only has Sega managed to keep going, producing new games year after year, they’ve managed to make a consistent success of it too. While the company’s home console production came to an end around 2001, it never stopped creating new arcade hardware. Exotically named boards like Hikaru, Chihiro, Lindbergh and RingEdge all followed in the wake of the Dreamcast based NAOMI, and many of them even boasted their own exclusive games. I’m still hoping against all hope that we might some day see titles like 2 Spicy or Let’s Go Jungle! on a home system but after so many years it seems unlikely. So much so that the arcade cabinets can take on a sort of mythical status. It’s been two decades and I’ve still never seen Planet Harriers in the wild, for example. But every so often, Sega proves you should never say never and plucks one of its arcade gems out of obscurity and brings it home. Even if it is nearly a decade later.
Sonic The Fighters – A wolf in hedgehog’s clothing
While Nintendo’s attempt to transform its own mascot platformer into a fighting game, with Super Smash Bros, resulted in a wildly inventive subversion of the genre that has only grown bigger and more popular with time, Sega’s own effort is the opposite in every way. A variation on the tried and tested Virtua Fighter formula, it appears way less innovative, and without a contemporary home console port, it quickly faded into obscurity, becoming a vestigial limb of a series that itself has faded from view over the years.
Night Trap – Frights, Camera, Action!
Think of the most famous retro games ever made. In most cases they’re famous for a good reason, and you’ve almost certainly played them. Night Trap is a little different. Chances are you know it for its controversial congressional hearing as the poster child for a moral crusade against an unregulated games industry. Maybe you’ve heard its equally fascinating behind-the-scenes story. Or perhaps you’ve simply dismissed it as a famously bad game, a kitsch relic of the short-lived FMV boom of the CD-ROM era. Personally, I fell into all three categories until this week. I knew almost everything there is to know about Night Trap, even had strong opinions about it. But, weirdly, I didn’t fully appreciate how it played…
Comix Zone – The Games Of Christmas Past #3
If there was one thing I loved just as much as videogames in 1995, it was comics. Specifically of the superhero variety. The early Nineties was peak comic book mania as far as I was concerned. Marvel and DC were firing on all cylinders with superstar artists and epic events, like The Age Of Apocalypse or The Death Of Superman, that kept teenage me absolutely riveted through my school years. To say I was obsessed would be a complete understatement and, of course, I looked to other media for comic book related fun wherever I could. But this was years before superhero movies would reach a storytelling quality that bore any resemblance to the page, and only a handful of videogames were elevated above licensed trash. So when I saw Comix Zone running on a mate’s Mega Drive, even though it featured no licensed characters whatsoever, I instantly knew this was a cut above any other comic game I’d played before.
Games From The Black Hole 