The 16-bit era was the golden years for licensed games especially games with the prestigious Disney logo slapped on them. Back in the early 90s, if you picked up the video game version of your favorite Disney movie, odds were that you got your hands on a quality title. Many words have been written about how …
Despite the awkward interim development and ugly 3D of its graphics, the N64, with its eerily shaped controller and under-utilized “camera” buttons (hint: that’s what C stood for, on all four of ’em) gave birth to a staggering amount of first and second party classics during its six year run, thanks in no small part to a little studio called Rare.
One of the most common requests that has reverberated from the RPG community has been the desire for a true Chrono Trigger successor. What fans have spent years pining for was the dream of a modern game that featured all of the great ideas which made CT the instant classic that it was: time-travel, vastly different timelines, paradoxes, and choices that showed consequences over the course of thousands of years. What very few people realize is that this highly anticipated ideal of a game has already come and gone under a different title: Final Fantasy XIII-2.
While there’s a long and varied laundry list of games that have challenged you to save the world, and more than a few that have challenged you to destroy it, Blast Corps must be the first game to task you with saving the world by destroying it.
These days, when you mention dragons, people automatically think of Toothless and his fanged friends from the How To Train Your Dragon series. In the days of old (1998), before Toothless won us over, there was only one dragon on everyone’s mind, Spyro. I was introduced to Spyro the Dragon when I was a wee lass back in high school, when the only console to play on was the Playstation.
Spyro the Dragon
Insomniac Games
Sony Computer Entertainment America
PSX
These days, when you mention dragons, people automatically think of Toothless and his fanged friends from the How To Train Your Dragon series. In the days of old (1998), before Toothless won us over, there was only one dragon on everyone’s mind, Spyro. I was introduced to Spyro the Dragon when I was a wee lass back in high school, when the only console to play on was the Playstation.
The graphics are so awful and the draw distance so shallow, that the perpetually foggy landscape becomes an enemy itself, endangering the player with unseen chasms and veiled ravines. The controls are so clunky when on foot and so floaty when on vehicles, that following the simplest road is a challenge worthy of the Paris-Dakar circuit. Gunfights with gargantuan bugs, which have come to harvest humans on Earth, are so confusing, such a fuzzy tangle of rainbow lasers and gelatinous blobs, occasionally interrupted by the smoky remnant of an explosion, that your Orange Glo soldier becomes lost in the visual chaos. Secrets scattered throughout each level are tucked into such distant valleys and improbable mountain ranges (cubist sculptures that only distantly resemble geological formations), that finding them is almost not worth the effort. Body Harvest has all the makings of a colossal failure, comparable, in its own generation, to Superman 64 and Small Soldiers. And yet, it is known as one of the best titles for the Nintendo 64.
Music has the power to make you move, to inspire great works, and to touch your soul. But as the year draws to a close, Christmas music prepares to blast our eardrums for what seems like an eternity, music becomes the enemy (I love Christmas, but can we at least wait till Thanksgiving is over before we deck the halls?). Before we all stuff our ears with cotton, let’s reflect on a game that really brought music to life in the distant year of 2008.
Chaos Legion Capcom Studio 6 Capcom PS2, PC When Chaos Legion first appeared on the scene during Capcom’s glory days, it was an easy game to ignore. With flashy sequels like Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry 2 about, and wildly inventive new titles like Viewtiful Joe, Okami, and Killer 7 (all developed by Capcom) debuting during the same time …