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PS1 games you may have missed: The RPGs

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As you all may be aware, Sony is finally picking up the software side of backwards compatibility for its shiny new system.

Since the PS3 doesn’t have any good RPGs or strategy games of its own yet, I would like to take this opportunity to recommend a few rare games that may actually be compatible with the PS3 by now.

I won’t lie; some of these games are inordinately expensive by used-game standards. But even the most expensive doesn’t cost twice as much as a new PS3 game.

My intent with this is to show you all that the PSX was, in some ways, an incredible system; it may not have had the sturdy character of the N64, but even though I am fascinated with obscurity, I hadn’t heard of several of these games a few years ago – well after the PS2 had taken over.

Revelations: Persona and Persona 2: Eternal Punishment
Since Persona 3 came out (I have been playing it much of the last month), it seems appropriate that the two predecessors that made it to North America be on this list. →  Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Post

Dreamcast Mania! – Overrated games

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What better way to wrap up our celebration of the Dreamcast than by killing it off? In my final entry in this series, I’m going to do what I do best – slaughter some sacred cows. Not all of them are at the top of many Dreamcast gamer’s lists (and some certainly are), but at the very least these were well respected games that I found to be severely lacking.

Grandia 2 – I absolutely loved Grandia 2 when I first played it. But I’m an older and wiser gamer, and I don’t think you could ever get me to touch this one again. When people so vigorously defend Grandia 2, I wonder if they remember just what it was they were playing. It is practically the encyclopedia of anime/jRPG cliches. Angsty loner hero who has a tiff with his brother. Demure and gentle female lead. Sexpot second female lead. Spunky kid, big tough guy. And by the end of it all, you end up killing god. →  Words are the towns and cities of letters.

Dreamcast Mania! – Great games you can’t get anywhere else

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Videolamer noticed that in our attempts to keep Dreamcast Mania! alive, so very many of our articles were about the things we missed out on, rather than a celebration of what we had. That changes now. Today we will be going over some of the absolute best games the DC (and only the DC) has to offer. These are not only the reasons why we loved it, but while we still do. These are the games that make it a system still worth owning and playing (meaning you won’t find games like Third Strike, which has a superior PS2 port).

Oh, and I only have a paragraph to describe each game. Prepare for distilled glory.

Soul Calibur – As far as I am concerned, the only game in the Soul series that you can argue was better than this one (and have me actually listen to you) is Soul Blade. For my money and time, this is still the pinnacle of the series. →  Read Theft Auto 4

Dreamcast Mania! – Canceled games: Forever Denied

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Over the last few weeks I wrote about two categories of canceled Dreamcast games, those that were PC ports trying to eke out a living on Sega’s machine and those that quickly found a new home on a competing console. In the final installment of this series I take a look at the most tragic of canceled games – games that gamers never got a chance to play.

Castlevania Resurrection

What was it?
This game was slated to be the third 3D Castlevania and star Sonia and Victor Belmont. The plot line was the standard Dracula-has-returned nonsense; if you’re one of the 36 people on earth who care about the story arcs in Castlevania, please let me know, it would be an honor to meet you. More importantly, Sonia was set to sport a very short skirt and wield a whip.

Would it have been good?
Some people are big fans of the 3D Castlevania games. I am not one of them and thus find it difficult to even pretend to objectively answer this question. →  The gamers have only interpreted the games, in various ways. The point, however, is to change them.

Do bad games get better as they drop in price?

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Game Revolution gave Excite Truck a C, partly because it wasn’t worth 50 bucks. Does this mean that when the game sells for $20 they will change the review score to a B?

Factoring cost into a game’s review has always been something I try to avoid. It is very difficult to do. As much as I pretend games should be considered as stand-alone pieces of art and should not be compared to other things you could do with the money, this is at least partially idealistic bullshit. If a crappy $10 downloadable game is a waste of time, maybe it wouldn’t be at $1, and part of the reason it’s a waste of time is because an episode of Sam & Max is only $8. Clearly, on at least some level, it makes sense to consider the cost of a game when deciding whether you should recommend it to potential buyers.

Excite Truck will be so awesome when it costs $7.

 →  Article Kombat

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 9.7.07

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Molyneux takes a shocking stand – his company is more influential than its competitor
In a recent interview, designer Peter Molyneux said that Microsoft’s Live will be more impactful than the Wii remote. Molyneux was clearly kidding – would anyone use the non-word “impactful” in a serious statement?

Pretend he was serious. Is Live more influential than motion sensing controls? This is not easy to answer, partly because it’s comparing apples to gypsies, partly because the Wii is very young and partly because in some form, both things being compared have already existed for years. At its base level, Live is the internet. Should we thank Al Gore for being more impactful on games than Microsoft? If that’s too far a leap, what about X-Band on the Genesis or SNES? Surely Seganet was impactful as all get out.
OMG Nintendo copied Hasbro!

The motion controlled Star Wars Lightsaber Battle game Hasbro released in 2005 is more fun than most Wii games. →  Sounds amazing, I must read it now!

Retrospective – Metroid Prime 2

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Continuing our look at the fabled Metroid Prime series, we now delve into Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. It’s a common occurrence in the video game medium that a franchise peaked early in its life time. When a game is as stellar as the first Metroid Prime, it’s going to be very hard to create something better. And this is an apt description of Echoes. It’s definitely a good game, but sadly, with nothing new to show, and a few problems introduced, Echoes doesn’t live up to expectations.

In this installment, Samus has accepted a request to find a missing Galactic Federation starship that was last heard from while hunting down a Space Pirate frigate above the planet Aether. All communications with the GF starship have been lost since then. Not one to pass up easy money, Samus accepts the mission and travels to Aether, but as she enters the atmosphere, a virulent electrical storm damages her gunship, leaving her stranded on Aether until her ship repairs itself. →  Final Post VII

Dreamcast Mania!: What did we miss? – Headhunter

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What Happened?: Headhunter was supposed to come out at the tail end of the Dreamcast’s life. It still did – in Europe. Its US cancellation was a big enough deal for IGN’s Dreamcast channel to review the import, meaning it was as important to them as Shenmue 2. Eventually Americans got a chance to play it on the PS2.

The Game: Allow me to get bold and assertive for a minute. 1998 was the beginning of a new little period in which a flurry of Important Games were released. They reinvented series, changed genres, and refined 3d game design. It ended with the release of Halo in 2001. It isn’t that innovation or good games ended there, its just that, six years later, we’re still copying Halo’s formula. Where we once only had Metal Gear Solid for stealth and Medal of Honor for WW2 shooters, we now have countless games in each genre. We rebuilt some franchises, and then franchised the fuck out of the rest. →  PaReader the Reader

Fishing for Quarters – Remembering arcades

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Being a kid of the Eighties and Nineties, I spent a ton of time feeding quarters into arcade games. We at videolamer may rain praise upon our little console buddies but we rarely talk about their much larger, and these days dumber, brothers, the arcade machines. If it were not for these coin-gobbling behemoths, consoles would not exist. There would be no Pac-Man to munch on stuff, missiles to command, or Tron…to do whatever it is that Tron does.

We owe a lot to these big guys and sadly, like all overly-huge things such as woolly mammoths, dinosaurs, Sony, the RIAA, and The Ultimate Warrior, they are becoming extinct. Not many people visit arcades these days, and for good reason. What was once a bustling, multi-genre industry has deteriorated into a handful of companies making fighting games, shooting games, racing games, and beat games. Consider this my tribute to a more innocent and carefree time.

All of my life I have liked video games. →  One must imagine video games happy.

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 8.31.07

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Nintendo stops whoring out Metroid, or at least Retro stops
Please, let Retro make a game it wants to make. I know you own them and want to assign them to a franchise because franchises make all the bling, but it’s really not in your (my) best interest. You have no “mature” themed franchises left, unless you’re giving them the next console Zelda. An excellent developer like Retro also deserves to be rewarded – let them design a game from the ground up. It could be dark, with nudity and blood everywhere. Perhaps bloody nipples. You know, mature.

You would get what you need out of them – an awesome title for the older gamer who is too insecure to play something cute and candy colored. Retro would get what (I assume) they want – the chance to make a game without being assigned 75% of the design.

I know you aren’t Nintendo, reader. Addressing you as if you were was some sort of literary device, possibly onomatopoeia. →  In the beginning games created the heavens and the earth.