Sam's video game collection essentials

Of course it wasn’t just mainline Mega Man that would make the jump to this generation of consoles, as its sister series Mega Man X would as well. As a reminder, the “X” does not stand for “10”, instead it refers to the protagonist named “Mega Man X” who is a distinct character from normal “Mega Man”.  Mega Man X4 makes the leap to a more technologically-capable console in roughly the same way as 8 did. That is to say, the graphics remained 2D but had an overhauled look, the basic gameplay concept wasn’t messed with that much, and voice acting and anime cutscenes were added. And, yes, the voice acting is incredibly cheesy to the point where it can be amusing. This does kill the serious vibes that the developers originally intended, unfortunately, but to me it doesn’t ruin the game by any means.  Mega Man X4 once again requires you to take on eight “mavericks” whose stages can be tackled in any order, which works very much like regular Mega Man and its robot masters. And like before, X4

The Blue Bomber continues into his third console generation! Mega Man 7 on the SNES had been the only entry in the 16-bit generation, and kept the series’ basic gameplay premise but also changed some things that made it really stick out compared to the previous games, such as the graphics and size of the characters, the way progression words, and the addition of an in-game shop, among other things. 8 keeps a lot of these additions from 7, and it does feel like they tried to modernize it a little more despite sticking with 2D graphics (which are smooth and nice, by the way). They’ve now added voice acting, including voiced anime cutscenes. This being a mid-’90s release, the English voice acting is, errrr….in a world, atrocious. But in my opinion, it does kind of lean into “so bad it’s good” territory because of how cheesy and crappy it can be. Dr. Light’s voice is especially infamous, it really sounds like they just grabbed some random dude off the street with no experience and only had

If you’re an American and not a gamer who loves Konami, odds are you don’t know what an MSX is. It was a type of home computer that was popular in the 1980s in many parts of the world, but not North America. I don’t know much about its history so I’m not going to say a lot about that here. But of course, various companies made games for MSX computers. The great Konami was one of those companies, and in fact they were quite a prolific MSX developer. By the mid-’90s MSXs were no longer on the market, and before long Konami thought it was appropriate to rerelease compilations of their MSX library. On one of the consoles out at the time they released three different volumes with 10 games each. And then for the Sega Saturn, they decided to lump them all into one release, with a whopping 30 games on one disc! Eventually large compilations like this became more common, but in the ‘90s it was pretty unusual to see one that included this many games. Perhaps surprisingly, Konami’s most famous MS

Oop…I jumped ahead of the alphabetic order a bit. And jumped over one of my absolute favorite games, no less. I first talked briefly about Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius’s SNES iteration. This remake for the following generation of consoles came out a year later, enhanced with the more-powerful hardware and coming with a lot of changes. Unlike other Parodius games and most other shoot ‘em ups at the time, this game did not originate in arcades and did not even get an arcade release. And it shows, for the better.  This does feel like an arcade game at first, as the basic gameplay setup is the same. You choose one of many playable characters, and you’re tasked with getting through eight auto-scrolling levels, scoring as many points as you can along the way. Most of the levels are in some way a reference to other Konami games such as Lethal Enforcers, Goemon, TwinBee, and others, and they’re quite imaginative. The beautiful soundtrack often remixes songs from other Konami games along with some

Here we have another game localized by Working Designs, which is pretty obvious as soon as you see the beautiful gloss given to the game’s box art. In Japan this was an early release in the Sega Saturn’s lifespan, but Working Designs ran into a ton of trouble in their localization process, due to the size of the project and securing all the licensing rights since the game is based on a manga and anime series. It wound up being the very last Sega Saturn game released outside Japan by a wide margin, hitting shelves near the end of 1998. Magic Knight Rayearth originated as a manga series in 1993 and soon received a considerable following. It features three young girls (Hikaru, Umi and Fuu) from Tokyo who are schoolmates and friends, and they get suddenly whisked away to a magical world and are told that they must become Magic Knights and rescue a princess in order to return home. The video game, not surprisingly, is based on the early events of the series, with some additional stuff added

If you spent a lot of time in arcades in the late ‘90s and early 2000s then there’s a good chance you’ve encountered today’s game there. Light gun games were popular in arcades, and Sega capitalized by making a great one with a B-movie horror theme. The House of the Dead sees you going into a dangerous, creepy mansion filled with zombies and other horrible creatures in order to rescue innocent people trapped inside. House of the Dead is what you’d call a “rail shooter”. That is, your character moves as you progress, but the movement is automatic and the player doesn’t directly control movement, instead needing to focus on shooting whatever dangers come their way. You have unlimited ammo, but can only shoot six bullets at a time before having to reload, which in this game (and many others like it) means shooting the gun outside of the screen once. A straightforward but effective gameplay setup. What’s cool about this game is the stuff you can shoot that aren’t enemies. Shooting at thing

First, I want to note that this is the first game I’m showing off that includes the original “spine card”, the piece of paper shown to the left of the disc in the photo. Japanese games for most consoles with jewel cases came with them, and they were on the outside of the box when the games were new and sealed. They usually look better on the shelf than the actual sides of the jewel cases do, which is why I suppose they made them. They’re kind of neat to have, but I don’t typically feel like I really need to own them. Back to our regularly-scheduled programming: what we have here is interesting because it is a bonus disc with a bunch of bonus content for big Grandia fans, such as artwork and minigames, but it’s not merely a menu full of options to choose and view whatever you want. No, there is actually a game tied to all of this. You play as three of the characters from Grandia, and you traverse dungeons with the goal of unlocking the bonus material. So it’s not just a bunch of cool ex

Developer Game Arts had already seen success with their two Lunar games, JRPGs on the Sega CD, which both received remakes on the Sega Saturn in Japan (which I won’t be covering here). But not content to just have one successful JRPG series, they sought to start another this console generation with Grandia. And what a game they made. Grandia is one of my favorite video games of all-time, not just one of my favorites of the genre. However, this post here is going to be pretty brief, because this isn’t the version that I played through. This release of Grandia on the Sega Saturn is the original version of the game that launched first, but when it came out at the end of 1997 in Japan, the Saturn was almost completely dead overseas by that point, and would have been even more so by the time they could have finished an English localization. So this original version of Grandia stayed exclusive to Japan, but thankfully a port of it to a competing console got a worldwide release which I will b

I covered the SNES version of Gradius III previously, but here we have a package that contains the first two Gradius games. These first two were already old by the time the Saturn came out. The first Gradius released in arcades in 1985, and the second game followed in 1988. They were pretty advanced for their time, and there were home console versions made but those machines weren’t quite able to faithfully recreate the experience. The Saturn and its contemporaries marked a new console generation that made practically-perfect arcade ports of these games a reality at last. I’ve already talked so much about Konami in this series. With all their many hits, Gradius 1 is one of their biggest and most significant. This game was a real step forward for the shoot ‘em up genre back in 1985, setting new standards for level design and gameplay elements that would have wide-reaching influence. It boasts a sophisticated power-up system that gives the player some freedom, as picking up a power-up it

This is two different releases of the same game, one obviously being the original Japanese release, and the other being the European release. This deluxe pack never came out in America, despite rumors back in the day that it would. The European version oddly doesn’t make it very clear that this is a multi-game compilation, which is especially puzzling since one of the games in the collection had already come out in Europe on other consoles with the same simple title of “Parodius”, and you’d think they’d want gamers to know that this release contains an additional game that makes this new package well worth their money. I want to take a second to talk about this PAL (European/Australian) Sega Saturn packaging. You might see in the photo that it looks kind of like a DVD case, but it’s not quite the same. It’s taller and not as wide. Now, there were a few different varieties of packaging that PAL games came in that were slightly different from what you see in the photo, but from my experi

Here’s the first Japanese Saturn release I’m covering, and you’ll notice the packaging is very different. Japanese Saturn games came in a variation of the standard jewel cases from the era, such as those that music CDs came in. For American, like with Sega CD, they decided to make very large rectangular jewel cases instead, which in my opinion look pretty cool, but overall are worse because they take up much more space, can cause the instruction manuals to warp because of their size, and they are much harder to replace because they’re a unique size. As for this game…yup, it’s more Konami. With new consoles like the Saturn that were much more powerful, companies like Konami were very happy that they could now make home versions of their arcade games that were much more accurate. Konami had several different series of arcade shoot ‘em ups at the time, and they took advantage of the new console generation’s power to make a few “deluxe packs” containing multiple games from each series. Thi

Prolific arcade developer Taito (makers of the famous Space Invaders) had released a popular arcade platformer in the mid ‘80s called Bubble Bobble, a game that featured little cutesy reptiles named Bub and Bob. The game received many home ports, most notable to the NES, and was a worldwide success. When there’s a successful platformer with a marketable mascot, you can bet that spinoff games in other genres will be coming. And so, Bub and Bob were featured in a popular arcade puzzle series starting in the mid ‘90s, the second entry of which is today’s featured game. First I want to comment on the strange marketing of this game. The series had a great name, being deemed “Puzzle Bobble”, which sounded good and made it clear what popular series this was a spinoff of. But for some strange reason, they decided to change the name for its international release, to “Bust-A-Move”. This confusing title would think the game has something to do with dancing, but it doesn’t at all. And there’s the

Here’s Sega’s next major console to succeed the Genesis/Mega Drive. Its story is pretty interesting in my opinion, but the history section of this post is going to be a bit abridged because there’s just so much to it…I feel like I make my posts too long already!! There are plenty of places out there where you can read more about it in more detail. This is the first standalone console I’m covering that exclusively plays games stored on CDs and not cartridges. As 1994 drew near to a close, it was about time for CDs to become the new standard. Sega had already made the Sega CD which released in Japan at the end of 1991, and the improvements in technology in less than three years were pretty astounding. This new generation of CD-playing consoles featured full-fledged three-dimensional graphics! Looking back on them today they seem pretty ugly, but back then it was pretty mind-blowing for a gaming populace that had been used to most games having 2D sprites.  The Genesis/Mega Drive had seen

Here we have the best-selling and perhaps the most famous Sega CD game, starring everyone’s favorite blue hedgehog. It’s also one of the earliest Sonic games, starting development not long after the first game was released. Sonic CD hit shelves between when Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 did for the Sega Genesis. Like most Sonic games, Sonic CD pits Sonic the Hedgehog against the evil Dr. Robotnik. This time, Robotnik has decided to try and convert this small magical planet into his own fortress to take advantage of its power. The power of the planet is held in seven special “time stones” which can control the flow of time and even make time travel possible. This game sees the introduction of a popular recurring character in the series, Amy Rose, a fellow hedgehog who has a big crush on Sonic. Robotinik kidnaps her to try and lure Sonic, which does work even though Amy is the one obsessed with Sonic and not the other way around. Time is not just a story element here, as the developers chose to ad