Total Object Interactivity™

Year: 1993
Genre: Platformer
Developer: Traveller’s Tales
Publisher: Psygnosis
Platform: Sega Mega Drive, Sega Mega CD, Commodore Amiga

Traveller’s Tales have an interesting history in that though they’ve been around since the early 90′s and have developed a lot of great selling games (i.e., the Lego series of games), they’ve never actually had their own intellectual property – they’ve always done work for other people. They started off working with Psygnosis (now known as Studio Liverpool and sadly made defunct by Sony Computer Entertainment) on Leander, an Amiga game similar to Shadow of the Beast and a game based on the movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the Mega Drive and Super Nintendo (other console versions were handled by Probe Entertainment or an internal Psygnosis team). Their third game, Puggsy, is something special.

Puggsy is what could be described as a physics-oriented puzzle platformer. That is to say, it’s a platforming game where you use items with a heavy emphasis on physics to solve puzzles and reach a goal. There are few other games that use these distinctions together, and even then they tend to be oriented around momentum more than anything, such as And Yet It Moves, NightSky and Mutant Blobs Attack.

Puggsy himself is a brown, blobby looking alien with an antennae reminiscent of a hammerhead shark. The game opens with him making an emergency landing on an uncharted planet after having his ship shot at by a space pirate (who, according to the manual, was in a foul mood due to under-cooked eggs and burnt toast for breakfast). As Puggsy takes a look around, some natives that look suspiciously like large bipedal raccoons make off with his ship. And so Puggsy ventures forth in search of a way home.

Controlling Puggsy is simple enough – one button to jump, one button to grab/drop objects and one to use a held object. When you’re holding an object, the up and down buttons on the directional pad move Puggy’s arms up and down, adjusting the height of your held object. Doing this allows you to create stacks of items that can be used to climb to new areas, or if you hold up and then the drop item button, you can throw the item with force. You can also get a bit tricky with this and use items to hook onto ledges and pull yourself up with momentum. Some secret areas actually require this skill. There are of course enemies that try and prevent you from progressing. There’s a few way to deal with them, such as throwing something at them, attacking them with an applicable object, such as a gun, or using the environment against them, for example letting a rolling steel ball crush them. Puggsy will lose a life upon being hit by an enemy or projectile. He’ll reappear in the same spot, but you only have five lives. Once those are gone you have to start from a couple of levels back, generally where the area began. A few items can mitigate risk, such as sunglasses which give you an extra hit-point before dying, or a shield which will protect you from any and all hits for a minute or so.

The first few stages of the game serve as a good introduction to its mechanics and it slowly eases you into how things are going to go before you reach the first boss without ever feeling like its holding your hand too much. Early on you’re tasked with fairly simple puzzles. Move these barrels around to climb some rocks. Use a shell to push this switch. Find the missing part of the statue to reveal the exit. After that you’re whisked away to the first boss. While it starts off simple, the puzzles get trickier as you go on. For example, you might have to turn some fans on, then push some beach balls on top of the fans and then stand on those beach balls, now hovering in the air, to reach the exit of an area. Or combine a handful of items in a cauldron in order to make a potion that allows you to access a new area. The puzzles stay clever throughout the game and never really fall into the pitfalls of “how on earth was I supposed to figure that out”.

Wearing cool shades can protect you from bears. The more you know!

Boss battles in Puggsy are, appropriately enough, puzzles with an added sense of danger and tension. They’re also very technically impressive, showing off a lot of graphical trickery such as large sprites, rotation and scaling that the Mega Drive probably shouldn’t have been able to do very well or at all without expanded hardware, but somehow Traveller’s Tales pulled it off. Bosses are also one of the first things to differ between the versions of Puggsy. The original Mega Drive version of the game has six bosses, whereas the Mega CD release adds three more to the fray. Aside from the first, or in the case of the Mega CD version first two, all the bosses are fairly clever and serve as excellent points for the game to switch up locales and interject “meanwhile” cutscenes where raccoons make off with Puggy’s ship some more.

Puggsy is a fairly lengthy game for its sort, having forty-one levels to the end, alongside sixteen secret levels, giving plenty of playtime. There’s a password feature to ensure you don’t have to play the entire game in one sitting, but it’s a huge pain to use. Each password is twenty-seven numbers long, giving you fairly high odds of making a mistake when writing it down. The Mega CD version allows you to save to backup RAM, but also has the password system and specifically states in the manual that passwords will work between the Mega Drive and Mega CD versions. The Amiga version uses passwords too, but they are generated differently and will not work on the other versions of the game. Funnily enough, this password system ties into a cute anti-piracy measure on the Mega Drive version. While the cartridge itself lacks any save RAM, the game at a certain point tries to write to it anyway. If it’s able to, which it would be if you were using a copier that supported save RAM, it boots you out to an error screen that tells you to go out and buy it.

The game’s development history is certainly an interesting tale, and very much out of the ordinary. Puggsy started life as a “demo”, a non-interactive program used to show off what a group can do with graphics and sounds which were pretty popular in the Commodore 64 and especially Commodore Amiga days, for the Amiga by a group called “DIONYSUS“. DIONYSUS consisted of Alan McCarthy, Lee Carus (now an art director at Sony Computer Entertainment and brilliant photographer) and Tim Wright. The demo, called Puggs in Space, featured a somewhat downy-looking Puggsy wandering around the streets of a fairly Earth-looking planet, generally having bad things happen to him, such as a dog biting his arm off or having a helicopter crash land on him.

Psygnosis ended up seeing this demo and liking the character. They bought the rights from DIONYSUS and put Traveller’s Tales at work on the Mega Drive version of the game. Once that was done, work began on the Mega CD version, again by Traveller’s Tales, and the Amiga port, which was made by a group called The Dome Software Developments, who basically existed to do Amiga ports for Psygnosis.

The Mega CD port is the best version of the game. In addition to being able to save and having the extra boss fights, it features nice CD audio, composed by Matt Furniss, who also did the music for the Mega Drive game, a few graphical tweaks and some helpful “tutorial arrows” for the first couple of levels. It does however, replace the cutscenes with some awful quality full motion videos. While these might have been somewhat impressive in 1993, they look absolutely wretched now. Also added was the ability to jump on regular enemies to destroy them without the use of items, making the game a bit more fair.

On the other hand, the Amiga version of the game should probably not be played at all. While it runs at a higher resolution than the original game did, the graphics look like they were badly upscaled to match, everything takes place in a box that takes up two thirds of the screen, the colours are awful and there are no backgrounds at all. The controls, due to Amiga joysticks only having one button, are cumbersome. You use up on the joystick to jump, the fire button to lift/drop, and then the keyboard to use and adjust height. If humans had three arms it probably wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s just awkward and makes playing the game a chore. Cutscenes are also changed to a still image, making them generally pointless. The music also suffers quite a bit. Though Tim Wright from DIONYSUS is credited, the songs seem to simply be bad rearrangements of the Mega Drive music that end up sounding very shrill. Interesting to note, Tim Wright ended up staying with Psygnosis for some time and went on to do the music direction for the Wipeout series of games, often lauded for their musical choices.

Sega Mega Drive

Sega Mega CD

Commodore Amiga

Supposedly at one point there was going to be a Super Nintendo port of the game, but it seems no information was ever released about it. There was sadly never a follow up to the game, either.

All in all, Puggsy is a very unique game, especially for its time and is definitely worth a look if you’re craving something different from the norm.

In no particular order:

Gravity Rush

Gravity Rush (PSVita)

Japan Studio/Sony Computer Entertainment

An open world game that gives you full control of gravity, which makes traversing the landscape a blast. However, the combat lacks depth and gravity manipulation can be a bit disorienting at times. The challenge missions also have long load times, and the game ends on a completely obvious sequel hook, but it is still a lot of fun while it lasts and is really unlike much anything else out there.

LittleBigPlanet Vita (PSVita)

Tarsier Studios/Sony Computer Entertainment

It’s basically LittleBigPlanet 2, but portable and with some not entirely awful touch controls for some object types. The “campaign” is also the better of the four LittleBigPlanet games, having far more variety and creativity than the rest. It also serves as a real showcase game for the Vita, as it looks absolutely phenomenal. If there’s one thing that brings it down, it’s that the online multiplayer has some horrendous lag, even when you’re only a few kilometers away from your partner. Supposedly this will be patched, though.

The Walking Dead (PC/Mac/360/PS3/iOS)

Telltale Games

Let me tell you, I really hate zombies. Absolutely despise them. They’re a lazy enemy for any form of media and completely uninteresting. Naturally, this made me apprehensive of The Walking Dead. In this case, I was glad to be wrong. A linear, episodic adventure game revolving around a man who was on his way to prison and the young girl he swears to protect, The Walking Dead focuses around telling a story first and foremost. You’re given a lot of choices in dialogue – some of them don’t matter at all, but a lot of the time you get called out on difficult, spur of the moment decisions you have to make. Puzzles are generally self-contained and not the obtuse, hour long pixel hunts that tend to plague the genre. There are some genuinely shocking scenes in the game, particularly in episodes two and three, but the whole package is fantastic.

Virtue’s Last Reward

Zero Escape Vol. 2: Virtue’s Last Reward (PSVita/3DS)

Spike Chunsoft/Aksys Games

The much awaited sequel to sleeper hit Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.  It’s still hardly a game, but it’s an excellent read and the escape puzzles are trickier, better thought out and more numerous. The final twists of the story, true to the style of the main writer, are mind-blowing and hard to see coming. Sadly the 3DS version crashes a lot and will corrupt your save if it happens in an escape room. Also, for the most part, characters are now somewhat-shoddy 3D instead of the nice 2D sprites that were in 999. The European release of the game unfortunately forgoes the excellent English vocal work due to licensing costs, so keep that in mind if it’s important to you.

Sleeping Dogs (PC/PS3/360)

United Front Games/Square Enix

Somewhat of a combination between Yakuza and Grand Theft Auto, set in Hong Kong. There’s less emphasis on gun-play (justified by guns being hard to get into Hong Kong), so a lot of the enemy encounters tend to revolve around fisticuffs. Thankfully, the melee combat is quite good, having elements from the Arkham Batman games (counters) and Yakuza (Heat Actions). The game’s story is interesting enough, being a bit of a homage to films like Hard Boiled. It’s also regularly on sale for ludicrous prices on Steam, and that’s never a bad thing.

Binary Domain (PS3/360/PC)

Yakuza Studios/Sega

If you got a blender, threw equal parts Gears of War, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Blade Runner into it and hit the purée button, you’d get Binary Domain as a result. Taking place about seventy years from now, robots are commonplace, but robots that can pass for humans are banned by a revised Geneva Convention. However, when robots matching this description, called Hollow Children, start showing up completely unaware that they were not human, a group of combatants from various countries is sent into a now isolated Japan to investigate. Seeing as your enemies in the game are robots, shooting various parts of them can break them in interesting ways. Shoot the legs off a combat robot and it’ll crawl towards you, attempting to grab you so that other enemies can attack you. Blow their heads off and they lose IFF functionality, meaning they’ll indiscriminately fire at friend and foe alike. There’s also a squad communication system – you can give your teammates orders and depending on their level of trust for you, they may ignore your commands, perform them normally or really go all out. They’ll also ask you questions from time to time, which can boost your trust rating. This also feeds back into cutscenes and can change the ending. Binary Domain also has some really fun and creative boss fights. Sadly, it sold quite badly, mainly due to Sega giving it almost no advertising.

Asura’s Wrath (PS3/360)

CyberConnect2/Capcom

Asura’s Wrath

To be perfectly honest, Asura’s Wrath is barely a game. Occasionally, it’s a really bare-bones brawler but for the most part it is strings of long cutscenes with Quick Time Events interspersed, making it somewhat akin to Dragon’s Lair. In this case, that’s okay, because the scenes in question are well-directed and ludicrously over-the-top. At one point, Asura, who is probably the angriest character in any medium ever, gets stabbed into the ground with a sword so long that it comes out the other side of the planet. This scenario ranks fairly low on the game’s craziness scale. Asura’s Wrath is structured like a TV series, and is effectively somewhat playable anime. Unfortunately, the true ending and final boss is paid DLC that will set you back ten dollars and quite frankly, that is absolutely disgusting.

Dead or Alive 5 (PS3/360)

Team Ninja/Tecmo Koei

Dead or Alive has always been a fighting series that’s fairly easy to get into for newcomers and those who aren’t too into the competitive side of fighting games, and DoA5 is no different. It’s fast, fluid and a lot of fun. The online mode is quite solid (unlike Tekken Tag Tournament 2), if a little barren and it loads quickly between matches (again, unlike Tekken Tag Tournament 2). Most of the old characters return, save for Ein (who somewhat lives on through Hitomi) and Leon, and the new characters are distinct and interesting. Team Ninja are committed to updating it with balance patches and other functionality, such as being able to upload replays to YouTube and compete against players on the PSVita when that version of the game comes out in February.

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed

(PS3/360/PC/WiiU/PSVita/3DS) Sumo Digital/Sega

Despite its mouthful of a name, Transformed is probably the best kart racing game I’ve ever played. Everything is tight, the tracks are incredibly creative, almost everything in the game is a reference to some historic Sega game, from Phantasy Star and Skies of Arcadia to Shinobi and Puyo Puyo. Unlike Mario Kart, every weapon is avoidable if you’re good enough and rubber-banding is kept to a minimum. Switching between karts, planes and boats as the track demands it is a lot of fun and a real breath of fresh air. Sumo Digital put a lot of effort into this game and it shows.

Persona 4 Golden

Persona 4 Golden (PSVita)

Atlus/Atlus USA

Okay, so my favourite game this year is an updated port of a 2008 game. That’s fine by me. I spent 80 hours on it when it was on the PlayStation 2, 50 hours this time around and I’m definitely going to do a third playthrough at some stage. Persona 4 Golden adds a lot of content, both minor and major as well as changing and fixing some of the gameplay systems, most notably that fusion inheritance is now totally up to the player instead of a complete crap shoot like it was in the original. It’s hard to find anything much to say about P4G that you can’t find elsewhere  – it’s an amazing game that begs to be played.

Notable Contenders

Tales of Graces f (PS3) – Namco Bandai
Ys Origin (PC) – Falcom/XSEED Games
Journey (PS3) – thatgamecompany/Sony Computer Entertainment
Mark of the Ninja (360/PC) – Klei Entertainment
Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 (360/Android/iOS/PC) – Zeboyd Games
Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time (PSP) – Career Soft/Atlus USA
Phantasy Star Online 2 (PC) – Sonic Team/Sega

A fan-translated ROM of Super Robot Wars J running in the VBA-M Gameboy Advance emulator.

There’s an inherent issue with being interested in video games from an earlier time. There’s not always an easy or legal way to play the game you want to. Take for example Ever17. The original publisher, Hirameki International, have been gone from the industry since 2008 (though their parent company came back in 2010 to sell console accessories in Japan). At the time of writing, there were no English PC copies on eBay. There was one copy of Amazon – for USD$400. None of the console (PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, PlayStation Portable, Xbox 360) releases of the game were translated to English. At that point, what do you do? What choice do you have? Do you just go without? Or do you turn to the ‘dark side’ and download images of the game’s discs and play it that way?

Similar issues happen on the console-front. A working 32X with all the cables can be tricky to find. Maybe you don’t want to cough up $500 for a Supergrafx just to see what that special edition of Ghouls N’ Ghosts is like. Maybe you don’t have the room in your home to have a whole bunch of consoles set up at any given time. Maybe it’s just really hard to find a copy of Bubble Bobble Part 2 for the NES. For those situations (and others), there’s a little thing called emulation.

In computing terms, emulation is hardware or software that performs the functions of another piece of hardware or software. In this context, an emulator would be a program, generally for your computer, that impersonates a console and allows you to run software designed for it.

Generally, if somebody refers to emulating a game, they mean on their PC or some other system. There are however, official emulations. Nintendo‘s Virtual Console service, re-releases of Sega and PlayStation games on modern systems, any of the DOS games on GOG.com, etc.

Emulation has some benefits to it:

• Convenience and portability – Having four or so decades worth of console games on your computer is mighty convenient. There’s no grueling tasks such as trying to tune your Atari 2600 into your TV, or finding a power board with enough spaces for the giant DC adapters that the Mega Drive, Mega CD and 32X need. No jamming styrofoam into your barely functioning NES so that the cartridge connectors will line up and allow you to play. There are products like Maximus Arcade and romcollectionbrowser (a plugin for XBMC) that present an easy to use interface for launching emulated games on a Home Theater PC. Putting emulators on laptops, tablets and smartphones as well as systems like the PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS is fairly common practice, allowing you to play whatever, wherever, whenever. Also if the ‘target’ system has a controller you hate, that doesn’t matter. I really dislike the Nintendo 64 controller, for instance, but if I’m emulating a N64 game I can just use a PlayStation3 controller, or the keyboard instead.
  

  Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii) running at the original resolution..

• Enhancements – Emulation can enhance a game in a few ways. For some systems, namely the PlayStation 2 and Gamecube/Wii, the resolution the game is rendered
  (displayed) at can be increased, significantly boosting image quality, as shown with the examples to the right. Some emulators allow for textures to be replaced – one particular project replaces the default textures in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, completely changing the art style to be more in line with a later Zelda game, Wind Waker. Games that never got an ‘official’ English release can be translated by fans. For example, Policenauts in its day was teased for an English release on the Sega Saturn, but nothing ever came of it. In 2009, a group of fans released a patch several years in the making that translated all the text in the game to English. There are some other nifty little possibilities, such as cheating and save states, which can render notoriously difficult games such as Ninja Gaiden beatable by generally anyone who wants to try.

..and the same game, running at 4x the original resolution, downsampled to 1080p and with a high-definition texture pack made by enthusiasts.

• Preservation – Your consoles probably aren’t going to last forever. Laser diodes burn out, capacitors lose their charge or worse – blow their tops and leak all over the PCB, the CDs themselves can rot and deteriorate, etc. Emulating the games provides a method of still being able to play those games twenty years down the track, as well as enabling people to see some unreleased games, such as those dug up by individuals like drz and ASSEMbler.

Of course, there are some downsides or negatives, too:

• System requirements – While older systems like the Super Nintendo or Sega Master System might not be particularly taxing, newer consoles like the PlayStation 2 and Wii can bring even a hefty system to its knees. It can be both system and game dependent, with some games needing a lot more grunt than others (Sonic Colours, for instance can cause a top of the line i7 processor to chug).
• Legality and ethics – Using an emulator for video games is generally legal. However, the method of acquiring the games to run on them can get iffy. Letter of the law states that if you dump the game (making an image of the cartridge or the disc) yourself and use that ‘archive copy’, you’re in the clear. However, if you download a game, even one you have a legal copy of, that’s a no-no. Realistically speaking, though, who cares in that case. Some emulators, such as those for the PlayStation and Dreamcast require an image of the system BIOS to work. These are also illegal to distribute.
  However, there’s an interesting conundrum, mentioned in the opening. If a game is completely unavailable to buy and the rights-holders don’t exist anymore, should you feel especially bad for just downloading it? It’s still an illegal practice, but it doesn’t harm anyone, making it more a matter of personal ethics and morals.
• Authenticity – Some people feel that playing a game on an emulator ‘feels’ different to playing it as originally intended. To an extent that’s certainly true, but it’s different for each person. It doesn’t prevent me from doing it at all, but I know of people who can’t stand playing emulated games.

While this is by no means meant to be a complete guide to emulation, it should serve as an interesting primer on the use of emulators for game purposes.

Further reading:

• Retro Gaming Hacks – a book by Wired’s Chris Kohler that provides easy ways of getting started with emulators for many systems, though it is a bit out of date now.
• GOG.com – cheap rerelases of old games with no DRM restrictions. Games that originally ran on DOS use an emulator called DOSBOX to function on modern systems.
• PS2 games on PSN – a list of currently available PlayStation 2 games that can be downloaded and played on the PlayStation 3 via emulation.

This was not called execution. It was called retirement.

Year: 1997
Genre: Adventure
Developer:  Westwood Studios
Publisher: Virgin Interactive Entertainment
Platform: PC/Windows

Blade Runner was one of the most influential films of the 80’s. Its influence on design, atmosphere and storytelling can still be felt in movies to this day. Like just about any movie, good or bad, it had a video game tie-in, right? Well sort of.

In 1985, Blade Runner was released for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. It created by two programmers, Paul Andrew Soddart and Ian Ellery – now a photographer and freelance illustrator for children’s TV shows respectively, at a company called CRL. CRL were unable to get the rights to the Blade Runner film, so instead they managed to settle for…the rights to make a video game based on Vangelis‘ musical score for Blade Runner. Naturally there are a few liberties taken. While you may be a rep-detect in a snazzy long coat with a blaster pistol, you aren’t (officially) Rick Deckard. You’re not hunting replicants, either. Instead your targets are replidroids.

Upon starting the game, you get a fairly faithful (at least in the case of the Commodore 64 version) rendition of the song Blade Runner (End Titles) from the soundtrack. If you’re playing the Amstrad version, you have to listen to this for two whole minutes before being able to actually start playing. This pretentiousness earned it a fair panning from reviews at the time. Once you’ve passed the title screen, you have control of a blip on a map, presumably of 2019 Los Angeles. You move your nondescript blip around, trying to find “replidroid” activity. Once you do, your hovercar deploys you onto the street and you attempt to shoot down the “replidroids” while avoiding the death of citizens.

Music and novelty aside, the game has nothing going for it. The gameplay’s blandness is matched only by that of the graphics and it’s next to impossible to figure out what to do. Reviews at the time were not kind to the game at all.

The Blade Runner license sat dormant for some time, until 1997 when Westwood Studios, known best for essentially creating the real-time strategy genre as it’s known today Command & Conquer released a Blade Runner adventure game.

The iconic “geisha” scene as recreated by Westwood’s artists.

Westwood‘s game takes place at the same time the movie does. You play as Ray McCoy, a runner working in LA like Deckard. McCoy is a fairly straight-forward guy. He doesn’t hold a lot of animosity towards replicants, like fellow runner Crystal Steele does. All he cares about is doing his job properly so he can afford a companion for his (real) pet dog, Maggie. Deckard, while not having a speaking role in the game, is alluded to by a few characters and seen in one part of the game, handing the scale to the lady at the market.

As McCoy, you’re tasked with tracking down a group of replicants who are suspected of murdering animals (from a shop named Runciter’s – a reference to the group in Ubik, another Phillip K. Dick novel). In Blade Runner‘s world, murdering animals is considered to be almost as bad as murdering a human, due to most animals being near extinct.

Westwood made some interesting choices with Blade Runner. For one thing, while the backgrounds are pre-rendered images and videos, the characters are made of voxels. A voxel is a volumetric pixel, essentially like Lego. Not many games use voxels at all, the most recent use being 3D Dot Game Heroes. The use of voxels gave the game a very unique look, but for smooth animations required a decently powerful system for the time. A lot of scenes, however use FMV featuring proper 3D models of characters. Reportedly, these videos took up 400GB of space on Westwood’s network storage before being compressed down to fit on four CD-ROMs.

Several actors reprise their roles from the movie, generally only for short scenes. Sean Young returns as Rachael, Joe Turkel as Eldon Tyrell as well as the actors for Leon, Hannibal Chew and J.F. Sebastian. McCoy’s boss, Lieutenant Guzza, is played by Jeff Garlin – best known for his work on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Vangelis‘ iconic score does not exist in the game. A couple of themes from the film play during the game, but they and the rest of the music is composed and performed by Westwood‘s Frank Klepacki. His work easily matches the tone and feel that Vangelis created and shows his flexibility compared to his techno-industrial work in Tiberian Sun or the straight up hard rock in Red Alert 2.

Blade Runner also randomizes a lot of elements. Between two playthroughs, some characters change. Sometimes they’ll be replicants, other times they’ll be human. For example, at one point you chase a criminal through a sewer. As you exit via a manhole, he ambushes you and is ready to off you when Steele comes onto the scene. Steele has “the knack” and believes she can “sense” the difference between a replicant and a human. She’ll either kill or arrest the criminal, depending on if he’s a replicant or not in that playthrough.

Sometimes characters will ‘do their own thing’ as you’re investigating – meaning that sometimes you’ll find them in different areas than where they were last time. McCoy also has several different ‘response levels’. By changing this, you can make McCoy seem like a normal person, a slightly depressed fellow, a hardass or “erratic” which makes McCoy randomly pick a different tone for each bit of dialogue he has. If you pick one of these, dialogue between characters plays out automatically. A fifth option allows you to choose your own responses like a LucasArts adventure game. These different systems, combined with thirteen endings, make sure that replaying the game isn’t a waste of time as you get a somewhat different experience each time.

“He say you Brade Runnah Mistah Deckard!”

Instead of having a standard inventory like most adventure games, McCoy has a “clue database” called Knowledge Integration Assistant – KIA. Using KIA you can review character profiles, evidence and plot threads. There are also certain points in the game where you use the iconic ESPER machine to “enhance” and zoom in on photos, as well as a couple of instances that involve you performing Voight-Kampff tests on potential replicants.

Unfortunately, Blade Runner came out around the time where people decided that they were sick of adventure games. The game did not sell well at all. Another high-profile adventure game, The Curse of Monkey Island, came out in the same month to similar results. Both games received favorable reviews, but it did little to help sales.

These days, Blade Runner is an absolute pain to get running on a modern system. The installer was 16-bit, so it outright refuses to install on Windows Vista/7 64-bit machines. If you can get it installed somehow, there’s a high chance the mouse cursor won’t display, which makes the game nigh unplayable. There doesn’t seem to be a solution for this, either. Potentially, a service like GOG.com could fix those problems and sell the game again, but with the rights being tied up with the movie license, nevermind both Westwood and Virgin Interactive being long dead, the average person’s chances of experiencing this interesting game are fairly low.

When you’re sad and blue

Year: 2006
Genre: Adventure
Developer: Irem Software Engineering
Publisher: Atlus USA, 505 Games
Platform: PlayStation 2

Freedom in video games is an interesting concept. Intriguing, often expansive worlds and environments are made for games and quite often you want to just run around and explore. However, there is a big divide between how ‘Eastern’ (generally Japanese) and ‘Western’ (generally American) games show freedom. That is to say, Eastern games are generally very linear, with the designers wanting you to play a specific way and follow what they’ve scripted out – such as Final Fantasy XIII, which doesn’t have any sidequests until fairly late in the game. Western games have a tendency to be very ‘open’ and let you do what you want – The Elder Scrolls and Grand Theft Auto series being prime examples of this.

Steambot Chronicles, interestingly enough, decides to ride the line between the two in a steam-powered mech.

Originally developed in 2005 by Irem, known for their R-Typeseries of shooters amongst other things, Steambot Chronicles opens with the main character, Vanilla Bean washed up on a shore from a shipwreck, with a young woman trying to wake him up. Coriander, as she introduces herself, asks Vanilla what he’s doing there but he can’t seem to remember. Yes, Vanilla has the age-old literary illness – amnesia. Coriander decides to take Vanilla to the nearby town, but as they go to leave, a blue Trotmobile (the game’s ridable mechs) fires a missle which causes a boulder to block the beach’s only exit. The two look around for a way out and find a basic Trotmobile that seems to have washed up from the ship. Vanilla decides to pilot it and uses it to clear the way back to Nefroburg.

All the cool kids turn up to concerts in giant blue robots.

From this point, one notices two things – the mech controls are really strange and there are a LOT of dialogue options.

The controls actually share more in common with Katamari Damacy than they do another mech game, like say, Armored Core. The left analogue stick controls the left leg of the Trotmobile, the right stick the right leg. What this means is, if you just push the left stick forward, only your left leg will move and you’ll just go in circles. Push both sticks forward, however, and both legs move, allowing you to go forward. You can strafe by pushing both sticks left or right and can quickly turn by pushing one forward and one back. Pulling both sticks back will move backwards and guard at the same time. Clicking both sticks in lets you pick things up, such as cars and rocks, then fling them at enemies. Your Trot has two weapons, one for each arm, controlled by L1 and R1. These can be anything from small cannons to swords to shields and water guns.

There’s a fair bit of customization to be had with the Trotmobile. You can change colours, design an emblem for it, change the legs from your normal two legs to something like a spider tank or reverse-joint legs, place a keg on the back for transporting liquids, a flatbed for moving lumber, a carriage for taking people places.. there are a lot of options.

Combat against enemies is somewhat unforgiving. Your canons have limited ammo, your sword’s durability drops fast and you often can’t take too many hits. Enemies like to gang up on you and move around a lot. Thankfully, you can do the same. By hitting L2, you can do a boost, which can be used to close distance between you and an enemy or avoid fire. R2 allows you to jump up in the air. Boosting and jumping, useful as they are, drain your fuel gauge faster than just moving does, however. You can also grab normal-sized enemies and either use them as shields or throw them at other enemies. You have to be quick though, as they can break out of your grasp without much effort.

Thankfully, refuelling and repairing spots are plentiful. You have to pay for the service, but defeated enemies drop a bit of coin and a bit of fuel, so you’re never too stuck. There are some large bosses to fight, but they go down pretty easily and aside from their size, aren’t much to write home about.

When you head into a town or village, you lose direct control of your Trotmobile and instead choose your destination from a list, which makes your Trotmobile use the roads (and follow road rules like traffic lights and right of way) and make its way to your destination. However, say you select “Nefroburg Bakery” from the list. You don’t just go to the bakery, you park the Trotmobile in the parking area near the bakery and then hop off, giving you full control of Vanilla to walk into said bread store. Not every point of interest in a town has a parking area, though, so you have to walk around a bit to get to places. This is all fine, you have a good map to help you out, but Vanilla doesn’t run terribly fast and swapping from the controls of the Trot to Vanilla is a bit disorienting. Speaking of Vanilla’s running, he has a hunger function, where if he goes too long without food he starts to hobble about, holding his stomach and slouching making getting places bit of a pain. It sounds bad, but it doesn’t affect your Trotmobile at all and is easily offset by carrying ten or so croissants with you.

The roads being shared between jalopys and Trotmobiles makes for an interesting contrast.

Towns are also where most of the side-content tends to happen. For example, early in the game you join a band with Connie and her friends, with you playing the harmonica. Once you’ve learned how to play it, in a pre-Guitar Hero style minigame, you can park your Trotmobile and practice any songs you’ve learned. If you’re good enough, people will crowd around you and leave you a bit of cash. My favorite part of busking is when the white-collar business man type characters, complete with briefcase, turn up and start clapping their hands above their heads – the briefcase, which seems to be welded to their hands, also goes above their head.
There are ten different instruments, all with different minigames. Some of these instruments are bought, some given to you. In the case of the electric guitar, you help invent it.

The game’s freedom comes in with the side stuff you can do in towns and the huge amount of responses you get to choose from in conversations. Generally, whenever Vanilla has a line, you pick it. For example, when you meet someone new, you can wave to them, shake their hand, even salute them. Hell, the game has a counter dedicated to the number of times you’ve introduced yourself via salute. Sometimes you want to be careful with what you choose. For one thing, you can annoy Connie and Savory so much that they’ll refuse to have anything to do with you outside of the story and even then they’ll complain. If you’re good to them however, you can show them around town, bring them back to your pad (if you rent and decorate one) and have them cook you a meal.

Halfway through the game, a terrorist organisation takes control of the oilfields, pushing the price of fuel for your Trotmobile up. It’s at this point you’re given the choice between two very different second halves of the game, which lead to distinct endings, giving good incentive to replay the game (as if doing an ‘all salute’ playthrough wasn’t incentive enough).

Unfortunately the game does have some technical issues. The graphics aren’t anything particularly special – they’re nice and clean and easy to see – but the frame-rate quite often takes a nosedive, even when there’s not much of anything going on. Worse yet, it’ll happen during the music minigames, totally throwing off your rhythm.

Steambot Chronicles was fairly well received when it came out. So Irem did what any company would do – make a sequel. The PSP saw two Steambot games, though one is just Blockus, the boardgame equivalent of Tetris, with a Steambot skin over the top of it. The other game, Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament, is as you might guess from the name, a combat-focused game. In fact, aside from a few little fetch quest jobs you really don’t do anything but fight in the arena.

Steambot Chronicles 2 is a sad tale. Announced with a lengthy video in 2006 at the Tokyo Game Show for the PlayStation 3, the game was in development hell for years. In 2010 Irem stated that they were still working on the game. In May 2011, shortly after the Fukushima tsunami disaster, it was officially cancelled along with the very-nearly done Disaster Report sequel Irem were working on. At that time, Irem also pulled all the R-Type games from the PlayStation Store and the producer of Steambot Chronicles and Disaster Report left the company. A disappointingly bitter end to an interesting and unique franchise.

Year: 1994
Genre: Horizontal Shooter
Developer: Taito
Publisher: Taito
Platform: Arcade
Also on: Saturn/PlayStation/Windows/PlayStation 2/Xbox

It’s hard to believe that at one point, arcades were dominated by “shooters”. Not first-person shooters such as Doom or Quake, but games where you had a small spaceship (or plane, as was the case with Capcom‘s 1942) and fired upon waves and waves of enemies, generally of the alien variety. In 1978, Taito more or less invented the genre, depending on your views of Spacewar!, and really pushed video games into public knowledge with Space Invaders. Space Invaders was one of those games which managed to become a household name and in Japan even managed to create a shortage of 100 yen coins. It was a fairly simple game. You had a spaceship, positioned at the bottom of the screen, and shot at blocky aliens who somewhat resembled sea critters. This last part leads us to 1986, where some crazy whackjob at Taito decided to make a game where you shot at giant mechanical fish, with the action taking place across three monitors to give it a huge widescreen look. Weirdness aside, the first couple of Darius games were very by-the-numbers shooters. They weren’t bad, but nothing special. And then, in 1994, Darius Gaiden was released.

Darius Gaiden is fast, fluid, fun, bizarre, weird and creepy all at the same time. When the game starts, you find yourself flying a ship, the Silver Hawk, through a mostly ruined city. Robotic fish-like enemies start coming towards you and naturally, you pump them full of lasers and missiles. Some enemies are a different colour to the others the little groups they appear in. If you shoot down these coloured enemies, they’ll leave a power-up behind. The more of these power-ups you get, the stronger you become (obviously). There are a couple of categories – weapons, missiles and shields. Collecting a few shield icons will grant you an energy shield that can take as many hits as power-ups you’ve collected. Naturally you should put a priority on grabbing these. Missile power-ups increase the firepower and amount of missiles that you drop when firing, starting at one and ending up at four and weapons can either have their strength increased or changed to a different type, such as two fast firing, but thin laser beams.

Rex Hunt would have a field day with this game.

Your arsenal also includes a “bomb”, which you can activate with a button press. Upon deploying the bomb, a black hole appears for a few moments, draws all enemies and projectiles that are on the screen into itself, then explodes with lightning, destroying normal enemies and dealing a fair bit of damage to bosses. You get three of these to start with and they are replenished if your ship gets shot down. You really need them, too – Darius Gaiden is unforgiving, which considering it was designed to sit in an arcade and eat your coins isn’t terribly unexpected. There are lots of enemies at once, all firing their weapons at you or just trying to collide with you, the stages hardly ever work in your favour and bosses take a long time to go down. The feeling of accomplishment when you finally clear a stage, however, makes it all worthwhile.

Once you’ve completed the first stage, a screen appears asking you which of two stages you want to tackle next, labelled Area B and Area C. This happens at the end of each level, for a grand total of twenty-eight levels. Of these, only two (Z and V) are repeated. Each play-through of the game has you visiting seven stages, with each final stage having its own ending. This will probably take you about twenty minutes, making it a short, but re-playable game.

An interesting thing happens about half-way through any given stage – a mini-boss appears. That in itself isn’t terribly novel, but each mini-boss has a small blue ball somewhere on their body. If you attack this ball prior to defeating the mini-boss, the ball can dislodge. If you then touch this floating ball,  the mini-boss will stop fighting you and actually switch sides, giving you a helping hand either until it takes an amount of damage or you reach the boss of the stage.

The amount of stuff on-screen can sometimes be a bit ‘too much’.

As mentioned a couple of times, your enemies are mechanical sealife looking things. Fish, urchins, crabs.. the best examples of these are the bosses. Each one is quite large and takes up at least a quarter of the screen, the rest of which is probably filled with lasers and explosions at any given moment. Thankfully each boss has a number of areas on it where you can destroy various parts, such as cannons, shifting things in your favour a bit.

Bosses also have really bizarre names. Before the fight begins, a message appears on the screen. For example, WARNING, A HUGE BATTLESHIP CRUSTY HAMMER, IS APPROACHING FAST.

If I had to dock points in any one area, it’d be the sound effects. They tend to sound very low-quality and empty, especially the explosion noises for small enemies, which have some odd echo to them. The music is.. weird. That’s the only way it can be described. Generally quiet and somewhat melancholy, there’s an overarching set of lyrics, which tend to go “Close your eyes; close your head”. Considering the weird factor the game already has, though, it fits. Some interesting things are done with the music, too. For example, while most of the levels use different songs and then again for the bosses, sometimes the music will keep playing from one stage to another, giving them a very ‘connected’ feeling. One or two stages have no music for at least half of their length, too, providing a very isolated touch.

As with a lot of arcade games in its day, Darius Gaiden was ported to home consoles – the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation. The PlayStation version was Japan-only, but Acclaim of all people brought the Saturn version to American and European shores in 1996. Two years later, there was a PC port too, but these days it’s almost impossible to get working on Windows XP, Vista or 7, so I don’t really recommend it. In 2006 and 2007, Taito Legends 2 was released for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC. Taito Legends 2 is a large collection of classic Taito games, one of which happens to be Darius Gaiden (also included is Metal Black, a game that uses the same engine as Darius Gaiden). The PlayStation 2 version, as a bonus, includes another Darius game, G Darius. The PC version of Taito Legends 2 can generally be found in bargain bins for ten dollars or less and is definately worth the asking price if you want a quick way to go fishing with a spaceship.

This story is not yet an end, for only you are in the infinity loop

Year: 2002
Genre: Visual Novel
Developer: Kindle Imagine Develop (KID)
Publisher: Hirameki International
Platform: PC/Windows
Also on: Dreamcast/PlayStation 2/PlayStation Portable/Xbox 360

You’ve likely not ever heard the term ‘visual novel’ before, so I’ll give a quick outline of it. A visual novel is basically a cross between a choose-your-own-adventure book and the Infocom interactive fiction games of the 80′s. Have you ever played Phoenix Wright, or Nine Persons Nine Hours Nine Doors? They’re visual novels. How about Sakura Wars, or Agarest: Generations of War? Those are two games which mix Strategy RPG gameplay with visual novel scenes to create something altogether different.

In a nutshell, a visual novel tells you a story, shows you some graphics and music (sometimes voice acting, too) to illustrate the scene, and then gives you some choices. Some of these can be quite complex (such as Ever17) or quite long (Fate/stay night is three times the length of all three Lord of the Rings books AND The Hobbit combined).

With that in mind, you can understand that it’s quite tough to write or talk about a specific visual novel without completely spoiling it, given that ninety percent of what makes it great is its plot.

The game starts off with two people, a college student called Takeshi and an amnesiac young teen whom the rest of the cast refer to as “Kid”, visiting an underwater theme park called Lemuria. Shortly after they enter Lemuria, the windows start cracking under pressure, the power cuts and everyone quickly evacuates – except for the two protagonists and five others: Youbiseiharukana (‘You’ for short, which has the hilarious end result in the English translation where she introduces herself by saying “I’m You!”) is a staff member at Lemuria with a pretty cheerful disposition. Tsugumi, on the other hand, is a cold woman who wants little to do with everyone else. Sora happens to be a holographic tour guide and assistant. The last acquaintance depends on which protagonist you choose – if you chose Takeshi, you’ll have Coco, an innocent young girl with a dog. If you selected Kid, you’ll find yourself with Sara, a schoolmate of You’s.

It’s what’s for dinner.

The group figures that a rescue team will come and get them out shortly, so they don’t

fret too much at first. Fear sets in, however, when they find out that the water pressure is proving to be far too much for the battered theme park to handle and that it will implode within seven days. Thus, their struggle for survival and escape begins.

Being made in Japan, the game was translated for English audiences by Hirameki International, which turned out.. okay. The game is still perfectly understandable, but there are some rough edges, such as when Sara asks Kid if he knows what a hacker is, to which he responds “Naturally, I knows the hacker.” Thankfully it doesn’t detract from the excellent story at all.

Graphically, the game looks good. Backgrounds have a good amount of detail, which helps bring Lemuria to life. Well, as much as you can do that with static images, anyway. Character-wise, everyone looks quite distinct, but never unrealistic – aside from Sora, but that’s to be expected.

The music really helps set any mood that the story creates. Deep, echoing slow ambience helps build tension when required, while cheery yet not annoying beats are reserved for the lighter moments in the narrative. Takeshi Abo, the composer, also did the music for the other games in KID’s “Infinity” series (Never7, Remember11 and 12Riven), but all four games have very unique musical tones that help his talent shine.

There aren’t many sound effects to speak of, but what’s there works just fine, if a little unremarkable.

Naturally.

Of course, the real draw of this sort of thing is of course, the story, which doesn’t disappoint in any regard. Already in a fairly unique setting, the characters have a real chemistry between them that truly helps the plot along. Along the way to the myriad of endings you’ll, by proxy of who you’re playing as, learn about perception in reality, the third eye, infrared light, witness a space whale (or…at least a large statue of a whale in a room painted to be like space – beggars can’t be choosers) and by the time you reach the true ending, twisting and turning like an M.C. Escher painting, you’ll come to realize something – there are next to no plot holes, and almost every conversation and scene has some sort of meaning to the overall plot. It’s quite amazing that a videogame, not a medium often lauded for its storytelling, translated from Japanese no less, was able to accomplish this.

It really is quite unlike anything else out there and should be experienced if you’re even remotely interested.

Sadly, Hirameki up and died before they could translate any of the other Infinity games, but recently Remember11 received a “fan-translation” patch, with work on Never7 progressing smoothly.

Also notable is the aforementioned Nine Persons Nine Hours Nine Doors, which was written by the same person who did Ever17. It shares a lot in common with the latter, and was recently translated by Aksys Games for us all to enjoy.

Ever17 had ports to the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 around the same time as its original PC release. Later on it got ported, along with Remember11 and Never7, to th PSP, bringing with it widescreen backgrounds and a new intro video. It’s also been revealed that Ever17 will be getting a full remake for the Xbox 360. The backgrounds are all being redrawn and characters will now be 3D models with a wide range of animations instead of static images. One can only hope that some group such as Aksys will pick it up so that a new generation can enjoy its great story.

Do you like pinball? How about 16-bit metal? Are you a fan of hitting demons with a steel ball? If you answered “yes” to any one of those, you’ll find something to like about Compile’s heretical pinball release. It improved upon their previous “Crush” game, Alien’s Crush, in quite a few ways – the major one being that the table now scrolls with the ball. In Alien’s Crush, when you hit the middle of the screen, it would blank out for roughly half a second and change to the other part of the table. As you can guess, that got annoying pretty quickly. There’s also a lot more going on this time around. A giant woman’s face grafted to some bizarre machine/armour contraption is in the absolute centre of the play-field, the “She Giant” bizarrely highlighted on the rear of the box. The more you thwack it with your ball, the more it slowly transforms from human to some unsettling demon-snake hybrid. It changes back afterwards, but it’s still very odd. Also notable, right up the top is a big glowing pentagram with robed “followers” circling it, whom you can hit and destroy. They’re obviously bad people and deserve to be hit with a big ball of metal that’s roughly twice the size of themselves.

That skull in the top right is what taunts you when you lose a ball

There’s also a unique feature where you can pause the game and get a password for your current score and table status. Now, I’ve not played a great lot of pinball games, but as far as I’m aware this is the only one that allows you to save your progress. You’ll need it, too, as the only way to see the ending is to max out the score counter. Yes, an ending. In a pinball game. Just one more thing that makes the game stand out.

Particular note should be given to the music which, quite frankly, kicks ass. The main theme has that amazing FM-synth ‘buttrock’ that’s sadly been missing in action since the 16-bit era ended and has several fantastic guitar solos that just make you want to keep trying your luck. All the songs in the game have a really quick tempo that help set the pace of the game pretty darn well. The sound effects hold their own also, with solid sounding ‘thwacks’ when you hit a flipper, and the demonic laughter of the hellspawn that governs the bottom area and mocks you when you lose a ball.

Devil’s Crush received a port to the Mega Drive/Genesis, by Technosoft (of Thunderforce fame), appearing in America and PAL territories as “Dragon’s Fury“. There aren’t any real changes to the main game. The colour palette is slightly darker due to the nature of the Mega Drive, and a few instruments have been changed for the music, which makes some songs a bit better, some a bit worse. A few songs from Thunderforce 2 are included also. On the other hand, the bonus stages are completely different. You can also ‘finish’ the game in this version by clearing all the bonus areas.

And there’s the She-Giant, in all her… uh.. ‘glory’

Tengen (a subsidiary of Atari, mainly known for publishing unlicensed NES games) published Dragon’s Fury in the US/EU, and apparently it was successful enough for them to make a sequel, Dragon’s Revenge, without any involvement from Technosoft/Compile/Naxat. It’s not a bad game by any means, but it doesn’t quite hit the high mark that Devil’s Crush did.

Devil’s Crush is also now available on the Wii’s Virtual Console service, and if you happen to reside in Japan you can also download it from the PlayStation Store and play it on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable, too.