Daikatana (PC) - Guest Post

Prepare to enter a world where down is up, design is law, and John Romero's about to make you his bitch.

Click the pictures to make them your bitch high resolution PNGs!

Final Fantasy VI (SNES)

Today I'm taking a quick look at Final Fantasy VI on the Super Nintendo, or at least that's my plan. It's an RPG though so I'll probably end up playing it for hours. Oh ignore the title screen by the way, it lies. This was the third of the series to be released in the West, so they renumbered it for the US version to avoid confusion (funny how that never works).

Annoyingly it didn't make it across to Europe though until eight years later, in March 2002, by which point it had gotten its proper title back again (and was ironically the sixth numbered FF game released over here anyway, after 7, 8, 9, 4 and 5).

I'll admit right now that I'm not coming into the game entirely clueless this time as I have actually finished this once before. Though I had my face buried in a walkthrough the whole time and I wasn't actually paying attention, so it'll basically be all new to me.

Legend of Grimrock (PC)

Today's game is Dungeon Master inspired retro RPG Legend of Grimrock. I'm going to find out what it's like and how to play it, and then pass that information onto you, dear reader, as that is what I do. Then I'll probably make a bunch of dumb mistakes, misunderstand some fundamental gameplay concepts, get hopelessly lost, and then quit out of sheer frustration about an hour or so into it, as I tend to do that as well I've noticed.

This one wasn't my idea by the way. I actually got a request to play this months ago and I'm sorry it took me so damn long to for me to get around to it.

(Click the pictures to view them as a big jpg compression artefact corrupted mess instead of a little jpg compression artefact corrupted mess. Handy if you want to have a fighting chance to read the text.)

Bubba 'n' Stix (Amiga)

Today, because YOU demanded it, I'm taking a look at mid 90s puzzle platformer Bubba 'n' Stix by British developer Core Design. This was released on the Amiga, Genesis/Mega Drive and CD32, but I'll be mostly playing the Amiga version because I'm guessing it came first. I'll let you know if the Sega version's any different.

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) - Guest Post

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) - Guest Post

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.