Koudelka refuses to be bound by neat descriptions. On the one hand it's definitely a dark horror game set in a Welsh monastery and as such contains all the pre-rendered backgrounds, torture chambers, murders, ghosts, suicides, and gruesome half-resurrected bodies the genre required at the time. On the other it's also definitely a '90s console … Continue reading Aberystwyth, 1898
It feels a little disrespectful to so glibly call the excessively titled Bakumatsu Roman Tokubetsu Ben: Gekka no Kenshi: Tsuki ni Saku Hana, Chiriyuku Hana (AKA: The Last Blade: Beyond the Destiny) as good as all the other fighting games created for SNK's glorious little handheld when presented with such quality but it's simply true: You can expect any Neo … Continue reading Another wind blows…
After a look at one largely disastrous attempt to bring an unexpected genre to SNK's action-leaning hardware, I thought it was only fair to balance that out with a more positive example along the same sort of lines: Densetsu no Ogre Battle Gaiden: Zenobia no Ouji, is a side story in Quest's famous Ogre Battle … Continue reading A kind of magic
This troubled Neo Geo CD release of Shinsetsu Samurai Spirits: Bushido Retsuden marks one of the too-few occasions SNK's well-intentioned stab at creating a more mainstream sort of home consumer hardware didn't receive an inferior (if vastly more affordable) port of a pre-existing AES game and have to pretend it was grateful for the second-hand … Continue reading Absence makes the heart grow fonder
Sacnoth were the creative force responsible responsible for the fabulous survival-horror RPG Koudelka, its slightly more famous (and dare I whisper it, inferior) sequel Shadow Hearts, the Dive Alert duo on Neo Geo Pocket, and this swerve out of nowhere into tactical mech action, Faselei (I'm going to leave out that trailing "!", it gives me a headache). They … Continue reading Toy soldiers and chips
When I splashed out on a brand new Neo Geo Pocket Color back in 2000 it came in an appropriate/unfortunate shade of blue camouflage (something of a then/now back there on my opinion of that particular colourway) and was accompanied by the excellent Samurai Spirits! 2 and the game I'm going to talk about today: … Continue reading The Queen of Fighters
Think of portable Sonic and you tend to think of the classic Game Gear adventures, all hang gliding in the rain and a zone's worth of bridge, or the later Game Boy Advance and DS titles with their new animal friends (there are always new animal friends), interesting Game Cube connectivity, and Jet Set Radio soundtracks. But … Continue reading A byte-sized blue blur
Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 