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Collection essentials #332: Street Fighter Alpha: Warrior’s Dreams (Saturn)

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Street Fighter II, as I previously discussed and as you already know if you are at all familiar with classic games, was one of the biggest hits of the early ‘90s in all of gaming. Over the next few years after its release, Capcom released several versions of the game which expanded and tweaked it in various ways, adding playable characters, faster gameplay, and eventually a meter that can be spent to unleash a super-powerful attack when full. But no matter how big these updates were, none of them were truly a new follow-up entry. This here is the first brand new Street Fighter game afterward, first released in arcades in 1995.  But rather than make “Street Fighter III”, Capcom decided to make the next game a prequel, hence the “Alpha” in the title. The game features some characters first introduced in the not-very-good original Street Fighter game, and it also has characters from their popular arcade beat ‘em up, Final Fight. This game also introduces a hidden character named “Dan”, wh
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Collection essentials #331: Soukyugurentai Otokuyo (Saturn)

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Also known as “Terra Diver”, this is one of very many high-quality arcade shoot ‘em ups that got ported onto the Saturn, which was known for having a strong library of these games. This one was by a company called Raizing, who later changed their name to “Eighting”.  I don’t have a ton to say about Soukyugurentai, or “Souky” as I like to call it personally. It doesn’t really bring anything different of note to the genre. It’s just really a remarkably well-made game and manages to stand out with that alone, which is remarkable considering how incredibly crowded the shoot ‘em up genre is. As is normal for the genre, you have a few different ships to pick between which have differing attributes. Gameplay consists of flying around the auto-scrolling screen dodging bullets and constantly using some form of attack to destroy hordes of enemies before they can destroy you. In addition to a regular shot that you’d expect to see in this type of game, each ship also has homing lasers. When you ho
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Collection essentials #330: Sonic Jam (Saturn)

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Sonic the Hedgehog is obviously, far and away, Sega’s most popular, successful and iconic character and franchise. So it comes as somewhat of a surprise that Sonic is not strongly associated with the Sega Saturn. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why the console didn’t sell very well outside Japan. When it first launched, there was no big Sonic title available or even one coming within a reasonable timeframe for fans to look forward to. It would take a full year and a half for a Sonic title of any kind to appear on the system. And even then, it was a spruced-up version of a game that had been developed and launched for the Sega Genesis at the same time (Sonic 3D Blast), and primarily developed by a foreign company rather than the series’ creators, so it wasn’t even really an exclusive or all that special. A brand new Sonic game was planned for a Saturn release, but eventually got cancelled. Sonic Jam launched over two years after the system’s American launch. This is basically the
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Collection essentials #329: Shining Force III Premium Disc (Saturn)

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We’re STILL not done with Shining Force III! Shining Force III was such a big and ambitious project that Camelot felt the need to produce a bonus disc of extras. This disc was not sold in stores. Any fans who had purchased all three games in the trilogy could send proof of purchase to Camelot, and in return Camelot would send them a free copy of this Premium Disc.  Some of the bonus features contained on this disc are fairly predictable. There’s an art gallery where you can browse various artwork for the game. There’s a sound and music test feature where you can listen to anything the (Japanese versions of the) games have to offer. There’s a video gallery where you can see stuff like TV commercials, 3D cutscenes from the games, and a developer interview. One thing that’s perhaps a little different than what you’d expect is a 3D character model viewer. This lets you choose literally any character or enemy from the games that has a 3D model for battle sequence, and you can view any versi
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Collection essentials #328: Shining Force III: Scenario 3 (Saturn)

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The epic conclusion. Scenario 1 and 2 took place at the same time, with the two games having you control different characters. The events of Scenario 3 start out much later, over halfway through the first two games. The main character, Julian, is a mercenary who is not affiliated with the republic or the empire. He joins your army in the first game temporarily, and does the same in the second game, until he leaves at the point just before when Scenario 3 begins. And of course, if you carry over your save files he will retain his exact level and items held throughout the three games. The story of Scenario 3 is a little less about politics and war, with the focus being on taking down the evil cult that has been working to stir up trouble the entire time. Again, the gameplay features are the same as in the previous two games, so do refer to my post about Scenario 1 for that information. I do think that Scenario 3’s gameplay is the most fun out of all three games. What really helps it is t
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Collection essentials #327: Shining Force III: Scenario 2 (Saturn)

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Here we have part two of Shining Force III, tragically stuck in Japan. Speaking of that, I want to start this post by mentioning that this game (the very copy shown in the photo) was the very first game I ever imported from Japan, in December of 2004, which as of this writing is coincidentally just a month shy of 20 years ago. The possibility of importing Japanese games was first planted into my head by my late friend Brian Castleberry who I saw posting on the warppipe.com forums. I had previously been aware from sources such as Nintendo Power magazine that there existed cool games that only came out in Japan. And then I saw Brian talking about how the Saturn has a lot of cool Japanese games worth importing. And then I found out that two thirds of Shining Force III is games that have to be imported, and being a big fan, that was enough to get me to pull the trigger. Twenty years and well over 300 acquired Japanese games later, the rest is history.  While this is part two of the story,
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Collection essentials #326: Shining Force III (Saturn)

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Here’s a big one. The previous game I covered was in Sega and Camelot’s “Shining” series, but “Shining Force” could sort of be seen as a sub-series, as seeing that word “Force” let gamers know that they were specifically in for a strategy RPG (well...that was the case when this game out anyway; later on they would break that rule). These are definitely the most popular “Shining” games, and I’ve covered a few of them already. For the third mainline entry, the developers wanted to really deliver something epic. And boy, did they ever. First of all, what’s super cool about Shining Force III is that it’s not just one game. Well…this entry I’m talking about here, what you’re looking at in the photo, is actually just one game. But in the span of less than a year during 1997 and 1998, Sega would release THREE games with the “Shining Force III” name to deliver an epic experience that covers one long storyline. Now, sadly, the Saturn was almost literally dead outside of Japan when these games w
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