Night Slave (PC-98)

I'm always eager to try games for systems I'm not familiar with, but it's surprisingly difficult to find out about good Japanese computer games that are both playable without understanding the language, and not filled with cartoon porn. So I decided to compromise this time around.

Wikipedia tells me that Night Slave on the PC-98 is an eroge game, warning that it's gonna have naked anime ladies in the cutscenes in place of an actual storyline. But it also comes with an option to turn the cutscenes off in the menu and play it as a pure action game about giant robots shooting things. No sex, just good clean violence.

So I'll assure you upfront that this post is going to be entirely safe for work, for so many obvious reasons.

Heart of Darkness (PSX)

Here's a requested game! A game "from the creators of Another World". Ulp.

That's an expensive looking logo. This is expensive sounding music. This may be the most intense game yet.

Lots of animations today! Keep an eye out!

Abuse (MS-DOS)

At last, some more words by someone who isn't me! This time I've brought alien bug killing expert Jihaus in to talk about about killing alien bugs in frantic DOS shooter Abuse.

Let's do this.

The game doesn't really have a proper splash screen so I'm using the box art.

This awesome run and gun platformer made by Crack Dot Com came out in '96 and gave us an early vision of what you'd get if you combined a platformer with the mechanics of an FPS (such as multiple weapons and mouse aiming). The game sports a control scheme that at the time was crazy different, resulting in a fast paced and unique alien/mutant blasting experience that you didn't really see in platformers at the time (or at least I didn't, I was poor).

I played and finished this game long ago but it's been so long that I am pretty much playing this as a newbie again.

Rick Dangerous (Atari ST)

Rick Dangerous has a reputation for being a total bastard of a game, but is it really so bad? Well I've played it before so I already know that it is, but let's pretend for 10 minutes that I don't know as I take a quick look at Core Design's very first tomb raiding game. Well actually their first game ever, released way back in 1989.

Final Fantasy V (PSX)

Today I'm taking a quick look at Final Fantasy V, the last of the numbered FF games to not get a Western release, at least not for a long while. But FF2 and FF3 were skipped over at the time because the NES had become obsolete before they could make it across the ocean. FF5 on the other hand could have made it into US shops mid 1993, around the peak of the system's popularity, so why didn't it? Apparently the reason was that it's "just not accessible enough to the average gamer", which has me a little worried, because I'm an average gamer! I don't want to get hopelessly confused by a SNES RPG, that'd just be embarrassing.

Incidentally, Square's refusal to give the world a English release made this one of the first games ever to get a full fan translation. Fortunately I don't need it though as Square eventually did give English speakers their own version of the game a decade later on the PlayStation.

Psychonauts (PC)

Today I'm breaking with tradition and playing something someone might actually care about. I figured I might as well seeing as people asked me nicely... months ago.

Policenauts is a 1994 adventure game made by Metal Gear Solid producer Hideo Kojima, but that's not important right now seeing as I'm actually taking a look at Psychonauts, a 100% unrelated title by Double Fine. It was their first game in fact, and they were lucky it wasn't their last considering it sold just 100,000 copies in the first year. I usually try to come into a game without preconceptions, but everyone knows that commercial success is a infallible indicator of a game's quality and artistic worth, so I'll be expecting the very worst.

(Click images to view them at an insanely huge 1280x960 resolution. Well it probably would have been pretty big in 2005.)

Angry Birds Space (PC)

Well, looks like today I'm playing Angry Birds Space then. Not to be confused with Angry Birds Star Wars which is presumably also set in space, but with more lightsabers or wookies or whatever. This is actually the fourth game in the unfathomably successful Angry Birds franchise and the first I'm going to sit down to play for more than 20 seconds. With any luck.

Honestly, I'm as surprised as anyone that I'm playing this, but someone thought it'd be hilarious to gift me a copy and ask me to write it up for the site. Not that I'm ungrateful, much the opposite, it's just... well, it's Angry Birds. How am I supposed to get an entire post out of this?