Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible III, Super Nintendo

The third game in the Last Bible series (a subseries of the Megami Tensei games), was developed by Multimedia Intelligence Transfer and published by Atlus – in Japan only – for the Super Famicom in 1995. It is a Role-Playing Game with random encounters and turn-based combat, and features the unique Megami Tensei trait of talking to monsters to try to recruit them, calling them into your party, and fusing them together to make more powerful monsters who will fight with you. This is a Japanese-only release that currently benefits from fan translations into both English and Spanish, which makes this excellent game playable to a good proportion of the Western world.

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Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible II, Game Boy Color

Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible II is the second game in the Last Bible series, which is a spin-off from the Megami Tensei RPG series. Last Bible II was originally released in Japan in 1993 for the original B&W Game Boy, with the Game Boy Color version coming out in 1999, some six years later. Neither version was ever officially released in the West, but there is an English fan translation for the Game Boy Color version, which is what I’m showing here.

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Revelations: The Demon Slayer, Game Boy Color

Revelations: The Demon Slayer is the localized English language version of Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible, which was first released for the original Game Boy, in Japan only, in 1992. This Game Boy Color version was developed by Multimedia Intelligence Transfer and published by Atlus, in Japan and North America, in 1999.

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Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible, Game Gear

Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible is a handheld RPG that was developed by Multimedia Intelligence Transfer and initially published by Atlus for the original black and white Game Boy, in Japan only, in 1992. The Game Gear version was developed by Sega and was first released in 1994 – once again: in Japan only. A fan translation into English was released in 2019, which made the Game Gear version finally playable to Westerners. Which is great because the Game Gear port is the best version of the game available. Let me explain…

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Crypt Killer, Arcade

Crypt Killer is a three-player, horror-themed lightgun shooter that was first distributed into arcades by Konami in 1995. It uses 3D polygonal graphics for the backgrounds and 2D scaled sprites for the enemies and objects. In some respects it is Konami‘s attempt at producing a House of the Dead-style shooter, although in my humble opinion it isn’t as good as Sega‘s famous horror shooter series.

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Kirby’s Pinball Land DX, Game Boy Color

Kirby’s Pinball Land DX is brilliant ROM hack by “kkzero” that was first released in January 2022. What it does is modify the code of the original Game Boy game to make it playable on the Game Boy Color, in full colour. Which is pretty amazing.

This hack – and kkzero‘s other great Kirby hack, Kirby’s Dream Land 2 DX – turn what were once monochrome games into a riot of colour, and they seriously revitalise these great classics into games that are worth playing (or re-playing) again now.

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Fart Escape, Commodore 64

Released by Picaro Games in 2018, Fart Escape is a humorous, free to download and play homebrew title that is a variation on the Angry Birds style of gameplay, except that you control a guy who propels himself into the air using only the power of his own ‘trouser trumpets’.

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Spectre, Super Nintendo

Originally an award-winning game on Macintosh computers, Spectre is a first-person tank battle game for one or two players, initially developed by Peninsula Gameworks. This Super Nintendo conversion was developed by Synergistic Software and released in North America by Cybersoft, and in France and Germany by Gametek, in 1994. As far as I can tell it wasn’t released anywhere else, so remains relatively obscure, as SNES games go.

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Zero Wing, Megadrive/Genesis

The English language Sega Megadrive conversion of Toaplan‘s Zero Wing has gone down in history as one of the (unintentionally) funniest games of all time. The intro sequence (which was created for this version of the game and does not appear in the arcade original) features some of the most hilariously bad translations of all time, including the now iconic sentence “All your base are belong to us“, which became a meme in the early 2000s.

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Zero Wing, Arcade

Zero Wing is a side-scrolling bullet hell shooter developed by Toaplan and distributed into arcades by Namco in Japan and Williams Electronics in North America in 1989.

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