Wario Land 3 is as good as I remember it back on Game Boy Color. It‘s a bit like Nintendo R&D1’s own Majora’s Mask in how it subverts your expectations going in and serves up a different kind of challenge using only the familiar as a base.
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After about four months, I finally beat Breath of Fire IV! I’ve played the first several hours a few times, but always bounced off of it due to the clunky camera, awful controls (seriously, how do you mess up the controls in a JRPG this badly?), and tight, tiny towns, but I’m super glad I stuck with it this time. Wrote up some very extensive first impressions here: nerds of a feather, flock together: Beauty, Dragons, and Isometric Horror: Revisiting Breath of Fire IV
The story and pacing really takes a nose-dive in the second half, but the actual controntation with Fou-lu was great, and I liked the ending (which seems to be an unpopular opinion?). I really love how the Breath of Fire games on the PlayStation take so many cues from the 16-bit era of JRPGs, instead of following in FF7’s footsteps. I’d love to see a modern take on Breath of Fire modelled off 3/4.
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Just finished Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti! Will post impressions on the Namcot Collection thread but I enjoyed the game a lot, Now Production did some great work on the Famicom, and this game was full of little surprises and fun nods.
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Loved your write up!
I think this passage is a very succinct summary of the visual aspects of games, and opens up a much deeper topic.
It seems to me that there’s an assumption from producers that consumers of popular media generally, don’t have much capacity for imagination, creativity, or interpretation.
Video games are a bit more immune to this phenomena, as it’s a less passive medium, but there are times where the boundaries are pushed and blurred.
In your visual example, modern games fill all the blanks in for you. No leap of imagination is required to see expression and flavour in the world you are invited into.
There’s a refinement of intention, through the limitations that early technology imposed.
And it’s not even the actual art and design at fault, more the overall direction.
All this really only refers to the blandest examples in AAA products. The best of the indie scene seems to be somewhat immune, or just more likely to take a riskier, and more interesting approach.
It helps that indies are more likely to make 2D or isometric games.
No stakeholders, committees, or focus groups to contend with.
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I beat the first Timesplitters (the easy and normal level culsters, that is)
It is a pretty simple game. There’s no real plot and all single player levels take place in multiplayer maps (with sections extended or cordoned off with each difficulty levels) where the goal is to find an item and then take it back to (usually, not always) the start of the level. Even though this was a design choice blatantly driven by time crunch more than anything (the game was made by a small team, most of whom had fucked off from Perfect Dark’s development the previous year), I actually found myself quite enjoying the format: levels are short and intense, there’s a lot of enemies gunning for you so I had fun learning the layouts and eventually pulling off the perfect speedrun. I think an indie developer could strike upon some serious gold by doing a more polished take on that idea
While clearly outclassed by its sequels (which benefited from having a more conventional, story-driven single player structure), Timesplitters was a pretty impressive effort for a PS2 launch game. There are a lot of maps, guns (albeit with many overlaps due to the need to clone many archetypes for the 3 different time periods the game takes place in), a neat challenge mode where you’re given tasks like headshotting 50 zombies within a time limit or escorting a duck so that restaurant staff doesn’t try to cook him. It runs at a cool 60 fps and featured a pretty comprehensive map editor. One thing I particularly appreciate is that it offers full buttom remapping so that you can reassign the buttons to something a bit more familiar. And gunning down people with dual uzis is just plain fun.
It’s not all perfect too, there’s no option to set the sensitivity for aiming which makes the Goldeneye-style aiming scheme a lot more annoying than it should be for the parts where you need it. The “1965 Mansion” set is just godawful, putting you in claustrophobic halways filled with shotgunners who spawn in your face and can empty your lifebar in a second, which discouraged me from doing the hard version of the levels. But yeah, all things considered, Timesplitters’ pretty cool.
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Yeah I always liked the original Timesplitters quite a bit, good write up.
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I never did play the original Timesplitters, going from your impressions and twenty years having passed I think I’d appreciate it today, back then I passed on its precisely because it didn’t seem like a fully-formed FPS following the likes of Perfect Dark, but none of that matters today where the genre isn’t really a contestable market anymore.
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Recently finished Scenario 1 of Shining Force 3 on Saturn. Took me much longer than expected, the final battles are pretty rough! 
All in all, an amazing Strategy RPG by SEGA.
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Finished Kai no Bouken! I’ll write more about it over at the Namcot Collection thread but I enjoyed almost every second playing it. Firm but fair difficulty and the levitation is perfectly executed upon. Just started the special levels and they are a treat!
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I 1cced Last Resort! (This is not my best showing as I one-lifed the first loop once and I’ve yet to beat both loops- but it’s been a while)
Of the two blatant R-Type imitators on the Neo Geo, Pulstar is by far the more popular and talked-about one, which baffles me because Last Resort is a vastly superior game in every way. It had the best spritework on the system at the time (at least until Top Hunter and Metal Slug hit), a peerless soundtrack, it features the most user-friendly and plainly useful Force pod in any R-Type style game and does a lot to improve on the flaws of its progenitor (chiefly, that the game is actually balanced to be recoverable at checkpoints - beside the asteroid section in the final level that is). The only problem is that at 5 stages, you want more because of good the rest of the package is.
It makes sense too: Last Resort saw the involvement of former Irem employees that worked on R-Type II while (despite frequent rumours to the contrary) Pulstar didn’t and as such doesn’t have any greater artistic ambition than being R-Type with Donkey Kong Country sprites.
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Finished moon: Remix RPG Adventure on the Switch - a beautifully designed adventure that makes us question why we play some games in the first place. You start the game playing a Dragon Quest-like on your GameStation, before being sucked into the game itself. The hero of that game is then recast as a mericiless killing machine who defeats monsters and causes trouble for the sake of gaining experience points, and it’s your job to clean up the mess you made while playing as the hero.
This is the core of the game, then, and it presents the world and characters of that Dragon Quest-like RPG in a more personal manner compared with the abstract, and often unfathomable way you saw them before. Instead of playing a faux-RPG you’re now in the faux-RPG world where healing the monsters you just slain and solving the people’s problems are your goals.
For its time in 1997 it had many unique ideas beyond its philosophical narrative. It featured a host of townspeople who live their lives to a real-time clock on a weekly calendar - sound familiar? At the beginning of the game you’re a stranger, yet by its conclusion you’re privy to everyone’s secrets.
I was even more impressed by the ending, since it was the perfect conclusion to a game that was already very interesting, and a work of art in itself. Without spoiling anything, you’re presented with two key choices at the very end, and if you really didn’t learn what the game’s been trying to tell you the whole time I guess you’d pick one of the options…
If you’re fond of video games, fond of games as art, fond of games that poke fun at other games, give it a go - make sure to check out the translated PS1/Switch manual first though! https://moon-rpg.com/en/sub/manual.html
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Really hoping that the game gets a physical release in the states. I’ll probably end up buying it before that though since it is one of the big “I wish this was localized” games of my past.
Yeah, it’s probably worth going straight for the Onion Games-published premium edition coming out in October. The game file appears to be a universal SKU (one file for every country’s eShop), version 1.02 (which added English) should be what got printed on to the game card.
I’m really excited by the hundred-page developer documents/notes that are included with it.
That they (onion games) already have dealt with Limited Run Games in the past makes me confident that there will be some sort of physical release not just in japan. Hope, of course, is a mistake so I’m not expecting it.
Just wrapped up one of my favourites, Shining the Holy Ark on Saturn. I’ve played it on and off ever since it originally came out, but never actually tried completing it until recently.
Loved every minute of it, felt like an old school “comfort food” RPG. Highly recommended!
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Congrats! Need to finish this myself, played a big chunk of it earlier this year. I got to the Tower of Illusion(?) in the mirage desert.
You can tell Golden Sun inherited a lot of Shining the Holy Ark’s DNA (it actually shares most of its game designers), since both games have stunning dungeon design. That dungeon where you literally walk on the ceiling was the most impressive, followed by the one with the turtles. But the mansion was great too - rare for a dungeon crawler to be filled with so many memorable moments from its moment to moment exploration.
What I loved the most was the game’s total commitment to the first person viewpoint, where other games in the genre reduce towns to a series of boring menus, here the towns are also locations to be explored. But even the shops and houses are all visited in first person which really shows off the attention to detail Camelot put in to this game. I loved how the shopkeepers will lay out their wares on the table in front of you!
The pixies mechanic also reinforced the commitment to first person, since it meant all battles and enemies appeared right in front of you rather than taking place in a separate scene. Really good.
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Couldn’t have said it better, you really captured a lot of the game’s charm @harborline_765! 
Haha thanks. I couldn’t help myself and wrote much more than I intended to, but I really do love a good Camelot game, and that even extends to their sports titles!
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I totally get it, the last 2 games I finished were from Camelot (well, technically Sonic Software Planning 
) and I feel like all of their games just ooze a certain quality. I haven’t kept up with modern games much, so I’m curious as to what they’ve been up to recently in addition to their Nintendo sports titles.
I would love to see them make another RPG in the Shining series… one can hope!
Edit: Just checked and apparently they’ve been exclusively developing Mario sports titles recently. Oh well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed!
