The term hidden gem gets thrown around a lot without much meaning - so many “hidden gems” are actually games that have certainly penetrated the gaming community’s consiousness.
Not so in this thread, which is great.
That’s partly thanks to a certain long haired metal fan. The amount of common or complete crap I’ve seen him claim as hidden gem is embarrassing.
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Played through the original Another Code on DS last week after seeing the remake waters down such a unique game to the point of banal homogeneity.
Now, Another Code isn’t the obscure game I played recently, but it led me to one. I had no idea that the game’s scenario writer and game designer, Rika Suzuki, has been working on detective/adventure games all the way back to the early Famicom era, as one of the co-founders of Riverhillsoft. This was long before CiNG of course.
What’s interesting is one of the J.B. Harold detective games has seen a largely uncelebrated and unplayed modern rerelease. J.B. Harold: Manhattan Requiem was originally directed by Rika Suzuki and released on PC-88, but it has seen a number of remakes over the years, including an FMV enhanced version for Laserdisc in 1993. before being remade again for Nintendo DS in 2007, and then again for iPhone in 2011, and finally that version somehow made it to Nintendo Switch in 2017, complete with the English translation released for the Laserdisc edition.
PC-88:
Laserdisc:
Nintendo DS:
iOS: Manhattan requiem on the App Store
Nintendo Switch:
Crazy stuff. While I imagine they were pretty important adventure games in Japan, it’s very hard to find any solid impressions or gameplay of the modern ports, especially in English, so I can only assume they’ve been lost to time.
I did find a mini-review of the Laserdisc version though, and he states the iOS version includes a few additions to make it easier to keep track of newly emerging information:
I’m hoping the Switch version is a faithful adaptation. Its developer, althi, apparently comprises of ex Riverhillsoft staff, who worked on the original games.
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I’ve started playing Jacked
It’s a 2006 motorcycle racing game released for PS2, Xbox and PC in Europe and Japan, but not the US. Various sources claim it was built off the bones of a game The 3DO Company was making before it went bankrupt: I have no idea if that’s true but what is true is that this game wants to be Road Rash real bad: you have the melee combat (done by flicking the right stick) and the weapons, ranging from your typical clubs and pipes to mfing grenades.
The big gimmick here is that you can steal (or jack, geddit) opponents bikes after you beat them up, and this is how you unlock most of the roster. There’s a catch tho: to force you to be choosy about your theft windows, your stolen vehicle automatically boosts for a few second after you get your ass in the seat and you don’t get to claim it until it’s calmed down.
The racing is perfectly serviceable (at least after you unlock better choppers than the awful starting bike) but the game truly shines in its alternative modes which fully take advantage of the chaos possible withthe game’s mechanic. There’s an especially fun capture-the-flag esque game mode whee you must collect a token held by an enemy biker and then hold onto it while the whole enemy team tries to kill you.
It’s pretty good ™. Certainly not worthy of the ridiculous 2/10 score by Eurogamer, in a review written by someone who clearly has Skill Issues.