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Collection essentials #376 &377: Rakugaki Showtime (PS1) and PlayStation Multitap (PS1)

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Here’s a game from Treasure, a great company I’ve talked about before originally composed of people from Konami, which made games on my list such as Radiant Silvergun, Gunstar Heroes and Dynamite Headdy. This one is pretty different from anything else they made, and it’s a real gem. “Rakugaki” in Japanese roughly translates to “doodle”. And you’ll notice that this game’s graphics have a sort of “colored pencil” theme to it, with the characters all looking like they were drawn with such utensils. It didn’t push the PlayStation hardware to its limits or anything, but it gives the game a certain style that helps its look age better than jagged 3D polygons. A simple way I would describe this game is if you combined a fighting game with dodgeball, though it’s more complicated to explain than just those two concepts mashed together. I’m not going to fully explain it in detail. But basically, like in a fighting game, you find yourself facing up to three opponents, and your goal is to get thei...
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Collection essentials #375: Pepsiman (PS1)

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Because apparently everything has to be more fun in Japan, in the early ’90s the popular soda brand Pepsi came up with a silly superhero mascot to market their beverage. He (to my knowledge) made his video game debut as a secret character in Sega’s fighting game Fighting Vipers in 1994. Five years later, he’d get his own game here on the PlayStation. You’d often expect an advertisement game like that to be mediocre and unmemorable at best, but this one exceeds expectations. The game’s front cover is possibly my favorite in video game history. Rather than the game’s title, all we see is Pepsiman pointing at the viewer giving a simple command, “DRINK!” I love it. The game’s spine card (which I don’t have) has the name of the game on it so Japanese shoppers seeing it new on the shelf would have known what it was. The premise of this game is that Pepsiman needs to deliver Pepsi to certain people who are thirsty, and he has to run to their location and dodge all kinds of obstacles along the...
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Collection essentials #373 & #374: Point Blank 2 (PS1) and GunCon (PS1)

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If you’ve been following this series for a while you probably know that I have a soft spot for light gun games. Well, the great arcade developer Namco (responsible for Pac-Man) made a series in the mid-’90s that provided us with some of the most creative and fun light gun games ever made. The games originated in arcades, and thankfully the games got ported to the PlayStation, compatible with Namco’s own “GunCon” accessory which is slightly annoying to plug in properly but is worth the effort. Point Blank games can be played with one or two players. Players select a difficulty and then choose from a variety of levels. These are all brief segments where you are given an objective and set of rules (time limit, number of bullets, etc) along with what is required to pass the level. If the player does not pass, they lose a heart, and losing all of them results in a game over.  The game is pretty cartoony and provides many creative and amusing challenges to be undertaken. You’ll have to s...
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Collection essentials #372: PaRappa the Rapper (PS1)

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I previously talked about Dance Dance Revolution, the first rhythm game that I’ve covered in this series. Well, DDR might be the most successful and iconic game in the genre, but it wasn’t the first. It’s somewhat debatable what should or shouldn’t precisely be considered a rhythm game, but PaRappa the Rapper is often considered to be the first one that truly set the template for the genre as we know it today, releasing in 1996 in Japan and in the rest of the world the following year. The most immediately-striking thing about PaRappa the Rapper is its artstyle. The game is fully in 3D, but the characters are all portrayed as paper thin, as if someone had drawn them and cut them out with scissors only then to find that they had come to life. The game’s unique look no doubt helped it stand out and attract attention when it was first released. Although the game was developed in Japan, the artist tasked with creating PaRappa’s look, Rodney Alan Greenblat, lives (last time I checked) in the...
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Collection essentials #371: Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee (PS1)

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Here we have the first game developed by an American company called Oddworld Inhabitants, and it’s one of those “cinematic platformers” that has more realistic movement than what you’d see in something like Super Mario Bros. and controls that purposefully feel a little “stiff”.  The character Abe mentioned in the title, as you’d guess, is the rather ugly-looking alien (a race called Mudokons) right there on the box art. The game opens with a well-made cinematic sequence narrated by Abe telling the backstory of the game. He tells of how he was a slave working for a meat factory called Rupture Farms. Despite being a slave, he mentions that he thought he had a good job…until he eavesdrops on a company board meeting while working late one night and discovers the truth. The company’s big plan for their next hot product is…Mudokon meat products! Abe instantly recognizes that he has to escape and help his fellow Mudokons do the same, and so begins the game. Abe is able to do some basic ac...
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Collection essentials #370: Norse by Norsewest: The Return of the Lost Vikings (PS1)

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This is a sequel to the wonderful Blizzard game “The Lost Vikings”, which I covered previously . Lost Vikings 2 came out in 1997, with two different versions. The dying Super Nintendo actually received its own exclusive version with pretty 2D graphics. I might actually prefer that version, but I don’t own it (as of now) so it didn’t make this list. The version made for various other platformers including the PlayStation features…well, actually, it also seems to have 2D graphics, just in a completely different sorta-3D-looking style that frankly I think looks kinda ugly. But this version also contains voice acting, so that’s nice. As with the first Lost Vikings, this is a sort of action-puzzle-platformer sort of a game. You control three characters that you can freely swap between, and they all have different abilities, so you must utilize their unique skills to figure out how to get through each level. This game can easily be played alone, but friends can join in and multiple character...
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Collection essentials #369: Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero (PS1)

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Here’s a game you might be surprised to see on the list. It’s one that doesn’t exactly have a great reputation. And I’m not gonna pretend like it’s some super great game and that the haters are blind, but I do think it deserves better than the reputation it’s got. Mortal Kombat is a series that has some cool characters and interesting lore and backstory surrounding it. For the main arcade entries in the series, the story and lore was transmitted through character bios that would display during “attract mode” while waiting for the next inserted quarter and also each character’s ending upon defeating the final boss. There was, of course, other media such as comic books and movies based on the games which gave fans more to chew on. In the latter half of the ‘90s, the developers had the great idea to create a single-player story-driven action game which would cover certain events leading up to the first Mortal Kombat game. And thus we got Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero, featuring one ...
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