Update 4/25 - Dezaemon, Gadget: Past as Future

Oops! I forgot to post this week's update on the blog). Might as well note that Trouble Witches Neo is out on the XBLA, and you can read a review of the original PC version, though it hasn't been updated to include the enhancements from the new version.

Dezaemon is a long-ish running series that originated in Japan and ran up into the 32-bit era. Its Japanese name might be impenetrable to foreigners, but it's basically a "Make My Own Shooter" construction set. The PSOne version was released on the North American PSN not too long ago courtesy of Monkey Paw Games, and with a help of a guide, you can figure out how to muck around with some stuff (assuming the PSN comes up anytime soon, anyway.) The article here gives a full rundown of all versions, plus tons upon tons of screenshots of various fan submissions - there's some cool stuff you can do with it, apparently! The other featured article is Gadget: Past as Future, a Japanese-developed interactive movie/adventure game was apparently rather popular when it was released back in 1993, though I'd only first heard of it a few months ago. I haven't played it yet myself, but it's got a nicely trippy art style. It seems hard to find the original game, but it was released last month on iOS platforms, which should be suitable for a first person game like this.

The featured article this week is Realm of the Haunted, a cool first person shooter/horror/adventure game that was recently released on Good Old Games. And your weekly kusoge is Pray for Death, an intensely bad Killer Instinct clone for the PC.

By the way, the adventure game book is nearing completion, but I'm giving it an extra head-to-toe run down to make sure it's as typo free as possible. I'm not really sure how long it takes from the time I hit the "approve" button to the time it shows up on Amazon, but I can safely say it probably won't be ready by the end of the month...an early May launch is looking more likely. More updates as they appear, of course.