Towers II: Plight of the Stargazer is a rarity on the Atari Jaguar – it’s a first-person 3D Role-Playing Game, in the style of Ultima Underworld, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, or the early King’s Field games, and it’s probably the only RPG that was ever officially released for the console. The game does look pretty grim, but thankfully plays better than it looks.
Continue reading Towers II: Plight of the Stargazer, Atari Jaguar
Developed by Dreamforge Intertainment and published by SSI for PC MS-DOS in 1995, Ravenloft: Stone Prophet is a first-person Role-Playing Game and follow-up to Ravenloft: Strahd’s Possession and it uses the same game engine as its predecessor but is generally considered to be a better game overall.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team is a ‘Roguelike‘ RPG, paired with Blue Rescue Team, and released for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS in 2005 by The Pokémon Company. It was developed by Chunsoft (famous for creating the early Dragon Quest games) and is based on Chunsoft‘s “Mystery Dungeon” franchise, but with Pokémon in it. It was the last Pokémon game released for the Game Boy Advance.
Continue reading Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team, Game Boy Advance
Steve Turner‘s classic Ranarama originated on the ZX Spectrum in 1987. The game is an overhead Gauntlet derivative where you play as a frog (actually a wizard’s apprentice, called Mervyn, whose botched spell has turned him into a frog), who must fight his way through various levels of a maze, defeating warlocks and taking their runes.
I was always under the impression that Paul Shirley‘s classic Spindizzy originated on the Commodore 64 and was ported to other machines, but this interview with Shirley says that the game was actually originated on the CPC and ported to other systems. Since Paul Shirley coded the C64 version himself I had guessed that that was a logical assumption to make, but it now looks to be wrong.
The Amstrad version of Spindizzy – one of the best games ever made in my humble opinion – is pretty much perfect, with crisp, clean, detailed graphics and responsive controls.
Revelations: Persona is the first game in the Persona series, which is a spin-off from the Shin Megami Tensei series, and was first published by Atlus for the PlayStation in 1996. It was actually the first game in the entire Megami Tensei series to be officially released in the West.
This modern take on a retro classic sees you take control of a “brave young paddle” on a quest to unlock the mystery of “The Spooky Door”.
Pong Quest is of course a re-imagining of the classic Atari arcade game, Pong, with cute, colourful graphics, a large variety of different Pong balls, and single and multiplayer play modes.
Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei (aka Megami Tensei: The Old Testament), is an enhanced remake of the first two Megami Tensei games that were originally released on the Nintendo Famicom. It was published in Japan for the Super Famicom in 1995.
Like most of the early Megami Tensei games these two titles weren’t released in the West due to them having controversial content based on religious and occult themes. Thankfully, though, they were liked enough by gamers to be given fan translations into English, and this SNES re-release was first fan-translated in 2014. It has also been fan translated into Spanish.
Shin Megami Tensei If… is a spin-off from the main Shin Megami Tensei series that is smaller and more confined than previous games. It was developed and published by Atlus in 1994.
This time the story is set in a school where a bullied pupil tries to summon demons in the gym, to deal with his harassers, only to wind-up being possessed by them and threatening to destroy the world. You play a group of schoolkids who team-up to try to stop him.
Shin Megami Tensei II is the direct sequel to Shin Megami Tensei and was first published in Japan in 1994 by Atlus.
While the basic gameplay is essentially the same as before, with tile-based movement and first-person combat sections, overhead city map sections, and magic, occult and religious themes, the developers deliberately chose not to connect this sequel directly to its predecessor, so story-wise it is somewhat different, being set in the far-flung future.
The King of Grabs 