Gokujō Parodius (Fantastic Journey)

Sounds fantastic

Say, what's better than Parodius Da!? The sequel, Gokujō Parodius of course. Those in the know know that its English title is "Fantastic Journey", but I'm not one for breaking naming conventions for the sake of one game.

Gokujō Parodius comes from a time where new entries in the Gradius series were nonexistent, and so on a technical level, it stands out as being a hundred times better than the game it set out to parody. Basically that means in 1994, the best Gradius game wasn't even a Gradius game at all.

Mission in Snowdriftland

My favourite advent calandar is back this year - Mission in Snowdriftland. It's wonderful.

Developed by a group named Extra Toxic, this online flash platformer was originally attached to Nintendo as a way of plugging DS and Wii games for the Christmas season. That was a couple of years ago, and during that time fans (including myself) wanted to see this thing become a commercial product.

That has yet to happen (though the Easter-based cousin, Chick Chick Boom is apparently on WiiWare these days), but it has returned in its original form for 2009 with an non-Nintedo indie games theme. Play it while you can.

Parodius Da!

Konami are an interesting group of developers. They make an extremely popular horizontal shoot-'em-up (Gradius) and then seek to parody it with Parodius. Parodius Da! is the second in the series, following an MSX game that nobody has played and hasn't stood the test of time. It's brilliant, and you should play it.

Top Gear 2

Tonight, I take this Mega Drive game round our track, and a violent goose is the star in our reasonably priced car.

Look, it's the Clarkson-less Top Gear 2, the sequel to... well... guess. Among other systems it was brought to the Sega Mega Drive, and is a fine example of a pseudo 3D racing game from the early 1990s. I don't talk about these sorts of games much, so here's an opportunity for me to do so.

Sonic 2 LD

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the Sega Master System is a nice game in its own right, but having been built by an entirely different team for a completely different console, it doesn't look much like its more famous Mega Drive counterpart.

But look, Doc Eggfan and co of Sonic Retro fame have changed all that. It's Sonic 2 as you remember it running on Master System hardware... sort of.

Frozen Bubble

I seem to spend a lot of time being screwed around with last minute cancellations and two hour breaks to kill. So fortunate then that I have an Android "smartphone" with enough freebie software to keep a Linux fan thrilled for life.

Frozen Bubble is one such piece of software. A completely free Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move clone which has already absorbed several hours of my time.

Billy the Kid Returns

Well... this is bad.

Billy the Kid Returns, another remnant from my DOS-based childhood. It was developed by a company known as "Alive Software", but trust me, this one's better off dead. Billy the Kid is a prime example of a truly poor and flimsy title worth the time of no man.

So lets spend some time finding out why!

Arcade Classics

Classic game compilations are great. With the power of modern technology the expensive arcade machines of years long past can now be played in the comfort of your own home, for cheap, instantly. Of course in some cases such as when Sega hop on the re-release train, you don't get the best results. Sega's classic "cat in a blender" additions to many Mega Drive musical scores repeatedly give your childhood that extra level of cringe, but others seem to do a reasonable job.

But what were things like before the days of emulation? Like this, Arcade Classics on the Sega Mega Drive (and Sega Game Gear). Can they get it right? Is it even possible to get Pong wrong? Better find out.

Mega Man (Game Gear)

American culture is an odd thing. Arriving on the internet full-time in late 2003, I was told that a FIGHTING ROBOT known as "Mega Man" was the bees knees among "most gamers". This theory was based on supposedly two decades of success and many childhood NES-related memories. Shocking, then, that I had never played nor even heard of a Mega Man game up until this point. Was I missing something?.. aside from a NES?

Well, if I had I known about the series, it might have been through this. Mega Man on the Game Gear. Other contenders are Mega Man: The Wily Wars on the Mega Drive, or something like Mega Man X3 on the Saturn... though being honest it's unlikely I would have came across any of them, and I couldn't have played this one since it wasn't released in the UK. But it's an entry to the series that isn't discussed much, so that makes it ideal for Blog Squirrel treatment.

Jumpjet

A fan of Luigi alerted me of this game. A Defender clone for DOS, released in 1990. It may look simplistic, but simplicity is one hell of a lot easier to blog about than the stuff I've been trying to push out for the last week... and it's got a few tricks up its sleeve which makes it that extra bit special.

Fire & Ice (Master System)

The Winter months are drawing near, and according to Procter & Gamble of Pringles crisps fame, the Christmas season starts in September now. So time to don your woolly hats and play something slightly festive.

It's Fire & Ice... for the Sega Master System. Why haven't I gone for the Amiga copy? Because I have no interest in messing with WinUAE on this laptop. Fire & Ice is one of those games I've known about for most of my life, but haven't had the urge to sit down and play until now. As with many games that originated in the first half of the 90s, you just expect they're mediocre platformers attempting to fit the gap which Nintendo were best at filling.

Commando (C64)

This game's theme song has been stuck in my head for the best part of a week. An impressive feat for a twenty five year old Commodore 64 title I hadn't played until now.

Commando is regarded as some sort of C64 classic these days. I know very little about the C64 scene so I guess I better find out why.

Sonic Fan Remix

Hey I'm not too thrilled about saving it as a JPEG either, but this is indeed a playable Sonic Fan game running in real time on this computer. It's the talk of the town at the moment - a fangame designed by Sonic Retro users pelikan13 and Mercury which, even if you're not a massive fan of the strange art styles employed here, completely wipes the floor with Sonic the Hedgehog 4.

Built with the Unity 3D engine, Sonic Fan Remix is a three level demo which surprisingly still looks great on slightly under-powered hardware. Things to note are an almost perfect physics engine and of course all those neat graphical effects. I can't say I agree with all the graphical and audio choices, but it's certainly the most impressive Sonic fan game I've ever seen... don't know about you.

The topic of discussion can be found here, though do note that thanks to the likes of Kotaku a lot of download mirrors have died hosting this thing. Nevertheless, fantastic stuff and certainly worth your while.

Super Skidmarks

A.k.a. Super Off Road II: Super Off Road Harder.

There were a lot of games like this in the 1990s because rendering racing games from any other perspective put huge strains on the hardware. This one, which by the way contains no skidmarks whatsoever, is a little-known game developed by Acid Software and published by Codemasters (of Micro Machines fame) for the Sega Mega Drive (and the Amiga... and once again the trainwreck that was the Amiga CD32) in 1995. It's not too shabby.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1

uuhhh ahhh eerrhhh

Star Wars: Episode 1 is a nice movie but I'll admit, it is a bit far-fetched to claim it's "just as good and relevant" as the original trilogy... well at least without filling the gap with episode 2 and 3, anyway. Until quite recently I had simply thought the Jar Jar Binks hate squad were running low on chill pills, but now I'm starting to understand their frustration.

Because this is Sonic the Hedgehog 4, the Sonic fan's equivalent to pod racing. It shouldn't exist, yet here it is to ruin our childhoods.

Wario Land 3 (Mega Drive)

NMMX of Sonic Retro has done the world a favour by dumping this slightly infamous hack of the Mega Drive platformer, Puggsy. There were a couple of videos floating around YouTube, with all sorts of uneducated simpletons claiming this was some sort of amazing pirate original.

Is it worth caring about? Well if it gets more people to play Puggsy I suppose so. It's a very bare bones hack which essentially just replaces the title screen, credits, and Puggsy sprite (as well as removing the Sega logo), but Puggsy is a very good game, sporting great graphics and sound for the time as well as PHYSICS. There's also a version for the Mega CD.

Oh and a fun fact for you - supposedly Puggy's anti-piracy tactics are still in-tact here so make sure SRAM is disabled on your emulator.

Super Off Road

In the early 90s, everything was super. From the fun houses to the star wars to the Metroids. But this is Super Off Road, in which the road isn't just super, it's off. Someone should have eaten it quicker.

Dick Vitale's "Awesome, Baby!" College Hoops

Every generation spawns a certain class of video games that are doomed to never have a future. EA's licensed sports titles are the obvious culprits as I've mentioned before, because regardless of how great the game was back in the day, nobody wants to buy FIFA 98 in 2010. They have a shelf life of about nine months.

But here's something even worse! A basketball game (with commentary by Dick Vitale) based around North American college basketball teams. It's not even the real NBA deal here! How many of these nails does it want in its coffin?

BioShock

Arrrgh

Perhaps I've been spending too much time with obscure gems from the past, but I'd have thought that playing broken software from two decades ago would give me a new found love for the blockbusters of today. Yet I can't shake this feeling that BioShock, the supposed 96-point masterpiece by 2K Games, is also a piece of broken software too. I'm having to question my own taste in video games - not a single person in the gaming press gave BioShock a score of less than 80%, and some people have the audacity to give it a perfect score. What's going on? When did I develop a dislike for this genre? Why don't I like this game?

Rainbow Islands Extra

Well I don't know about you but Taito's classic, Rainbow Islands, just doesn't have enough Darius in it. Guess we'll have to fix that.

Rainbow Islands Extra. Yes it's real, and it's not a fan-made hack (which was my assumption at first). This is Taito's Rainbow Islands combined with Taito's Darius shoot-'em-up franchise (sorry, no kings of Persia here). I can't say I understand why such a game needs to exist, but it does, and I'm here to review it... sort of.