Tag Archives: Monsters

The 7th Saga, Super Nintendo

The 7th Saga is an obscure Japanese Role-Playing Game developed by Produce! and published by Enix for the Super Nintendo in 1993.

The story and gameplay of The 7th Saga are fairly simple – at least when compared to other SNES RPGs, like Seiken Densetsu 3 – but the game moves at a quick pace and also has a few unique features of its own that make it memorable.

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Gemfire, Super Nintendo

Gemfire is a turn-based medieval strategy game developed and published by Koei. It was first released for the NES/Famicom in 1991 and given an updated Super Nintendo release in 1992.

The NES and Super Nintendo versions are essentially the same game, but the SNES version has updated graphics and sound.

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Gemfire, NES/Famicom

Gemfire is a fantasy, turn-based, conquest/strategy war game developed and published by Koei for the NES/Famicom and first released in 1991. It is known as Royal Blood in its native Japan and was called Gemfire for its North American English language release.

The game is similar to the classic Defender of the Crown, in that the aim is to dominate a map of territories that are occupied by opponent’s castles and armies.

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Rainbow Islands, Amstrad CPC

Graftgold‘s conversion of Rainbow Islands on the Amstrad is a decent port of the brilliant Taito arcade game. It was published by Ocean Software in 1990.

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Dragontorc, Amstrad CPC

I didn’t know that Dragontorc existed on the Amstrad until recently and was pleasantly surprised to find out that it did. Dragontorc is one of my all-time favourite ZX Spectrum games and it translates well to the CPC, flickery graphics included.

Dragontorc was designed and programmed by Steve Turner (of Graftgold fame) and is a sequel to the game Avalon, both of which feature a levitating mage called Maroc on a quest to defeat the forces of evil.

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King’s Field IV, PlayStation 2

King’s Field IV was developed and published by FromSoftware in Japan in 2001 for the PlayStation 2. It was later released as King’s Field: The Ancient City in North America in 2002, and in Europe (as simply King’s Field IV) in 2003. It is another first-person RPG and is the fourth and final game in the King’s Field series.

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King’s Field III, PlayStation

King’s Field III is the second sequel in FromSoftware‘s classic first-person RPG series and was first released in Japan in 1996. It was published in North America by ASCII Entertainment under the title of “King’s Field II” (because the original King’s Field was only released in Japan).

For my money, King’s Field III is the best of the three PlayStation King’s Field games, with larger, more interesting environments, and a bigger scope than the previous two games. The graphics are still borderline laughable, and the controls are still cumbersome, but the gameplay has evolved reasonably well in the space of a couple of years.

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King’s Field II, PlayStation

FromSoftware‘s King’s Field II was initially released in Japan in 1995 and it is another first-person RPG with open world exploration, dodgy graphics and challenging combat. It was later published under the title “King’s Field” by ASCII Entertainment in North America and Sony in Europe in 1996, which does cause some confusion as the western titling ignores the actual first game in the series. For clarity: the official English language “King’s Field” is actually King’s Field II – the sequel.

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King’s Field, PlayStation

With Elden Ring currently wowing gamers I thought I’d take a look at the series that began FromSoftware‘s journey into the action RPG genre, and that would be King’s Field – released in Japan only in 1994 for the Sony PlayStation – and, to be honest, it couldn’t be any further removed from Elden Ring in terms of presentation…

I’ve played a lot of RPGs in my time, and I would go so far as to say that it’s my favourite genre of video game, but King’s Field came as a bit of a shock to me. Yes, King’s Field was an early 3D RPG on the PlayStation, releasing the same year as the PS1 was launched, but it post-dates Ultima Underworld by two years and is archaic in comparison.

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Doom 64, Nintendo 64

Developed by Midway Studios San Diego and published by Midway Games in 1997, Doom 64 is a sequel to Doom II that contains a single-player campaign, but no multiplayer.

In total there are 28 campaign levels and four secret levels. Monster and weapon graphics have been redesigned and are unique to Doom 64.

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