I've been wanting to cover more classic CRPGs recently, and thanks to some awesome contributors, this is now coming to pass. To follow up on the Might and Magic article from the past few weeks, we now have the first part of an article on Ultima, the progenator of the genre and inspiration for hundreds of games. It's a massive series that we'll be posting updates for weekly, as right now it covers the intro and the first three games.
Following that up are some single game articles. Wizorb is a brick-breaker that was recently released on the XBLIG, which adds some RPG elements to make it stand out from Arkanoid, and features a cool post-retro graphical style. Zombie Nation is an NES "classic" where you control a disembodied samurai head against marauding invaders who are terrorizing the United States, including a Mesuda-ized version of the State of Liberty. And SPLAT'ERS is a very early first person shooter, predating Wolfenstein 3D and available only on the Macintosh, which shows some of the roots of what is now the most popular genre in gaming today.
We also have a feature article dubbed the Video Game Casebook, which is a series of blog articles focused around the issues of researching video game history. Your weekly crap game is Ground Zero Texas, one of the Sega CD's many dire FMV games, although here it gets a fairly even-handed assestment despite being largely insufferable. And I can't remember if we've made Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky a feature article before, but we're doing it anyway. Last week Siliconera posted an interview saying that the PSP game, released a few months ago, hasn't quite gotten the sales numbers to convince their investors to localize the sequel. So, you should buy it if you remotely have any interest in Japanese RPGs. It's classic-styled through and through, but it's better than most that come out nowadays, and is a welcome antithesis to anyone who complains about the dire writing so prominent in Japanese games.
This really sucks about the Legend of Heroes sequels prospects. I've imported my special editions of TitS and all the Ys games, not much else I can do :(
ReplyDelete