Sam's video game collection essentials

And now we have another famous game which provided a mascot for the PlayStation.  As you can see from the images, you control the eponymous Spyro, who is a young dragon. The plot involves Gnasty Gnorc ( who is half gnome, half orc) turning every dragon except for Spyro into a statue and also scattering the dragons’ collection of gemstones throughout the worlds and even transforming some of them into living breathing bad guys. Being the only free dragon left, Spyro goes on a quest to free everybody and get the treasure back.  This game is a “collectathon” 3D platformer with rather open-ended level design. The game is divided into many levels, but they are pretty big and meant to be explored to rescue every dragon and find every gem hidden within.  Spyro has three very distinct moves which makes him stand out from your typical platformer hero. He can glide, spit fire, and do a headbutt charge. The game is well-designed around these abilities. Many enemies are immune to one ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

Here’s a very interesting release. Fighting games back in the ‘90s were almost always made for arcades, due to them being very multiplayer-focused and because arcade hardware was best. But Mortal Kombat Trilogy is a game made exclusively for consoles and never saw an arcade release of any kind, and it’s hard for me to think of any other popular fighting game series in the ‘90s that had a game like that.  What actually IS Mortal Kombat Trilogy? It’s basically a third version of Mortal Kombat 3, releasing less than a year after the second edition, “Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3”. And it kinda feels in a way like a love letter to the fans, because EVERY playable character from the previous Mortal Kombat games is included, INCLUDING the big bad burly bosses which normally aren’t playable! They included Noob Saibot and Rain who were previously selectable in just the SNES and Genesis ports of UMK3. Also included are four “classic” editions of characters from Mortal Kombat 1 or Mortal Kombat I...

I previously wrote about Mortal Kombat 3 when I covered the SNES port of the game. You can refer to that post for some info about what’s new and different in Mortal Kombat 3 compared to previous games.  Here’s another very early PlayStation game, released the month after the console launched, and that’s why the game comes in the big jewel case. It’s interesting to me how the text on the front of the box simply says “MK3” and not the game’s full title, and I suppose they expected gamers at this point to know what that stood for. This port was done a little bit before the updated “Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3” released in arcades, so that content is not included here. Although MK3 is a game that’s entirely in 2D, it’s a good example of the increased power of the next console generation. The arcade version of the game is reproduced pretty much perfectly here aside from the added loading times due to the game coming on a disc. The sound and graphics are crisp and beautiful. If you compare...

And now we have one of the significant and revered games on the original PlayStation. It’s a top-10 seller in the console’s library, and #1 among games made by the legendary Konami. The creator of the game and series, Hideo Kojima, is now one of the most famous and revered video game designers of all-time. Metal Gear as a series actually debuted over a decade earlier, with two games for MSX2 computers in Japan. Since MSX2 was not popular in America, the games didn’t come out here in their original forms. The first Metal Gear, though, received a port to the Nintendo Entertainment System which with some big changes (for the worse) from the original, and that port did see a worldwide release and sold very well. The second game never received such a port and remained stuck in Japan. Despite their success, Metal Gear as a series went dormant for years after those two games, as Kojima worked on other projects such as Snatcher, and this third game took an unusually long time to make. These ar...

Again, I already have covered the original version of Lunar 2 on the Sega CD. You can refer to that post for basic info about the story . This, in my opinion, is the definitive Lunar game, and one of the best RPGs not just on the RPG-heavy PlayStation, but of all-time, just in general. This game was made by Game Arts, who also made Grandia, which I recently sang the praises of. As I said before, to me the backbone of truly great fiction is great characters, and Lunar 2 has an absolutely wonderful cast. You’ve got the boy hero named Hiro who wants to be an explorer, his whiny flying pink cat-like thing named ruby who claims to be a baby dragon, the mysterious girl Lucia seemingly tasked with a divine mission who is oblivious to the world’s norms, the former priest turned gambler Ronfar who has a great sense of humor, the money-loving Lemina from a famous magic guild, the dancer Jean who is also skilled in martial arts and comes from a difficult past, and captain of the guard Leo who has...

I talked about the two Lunar games on Sega CD previously, the first of which was “The Silver Star”. With video game technology improving, Game Arts decided just a few years after the original game to give it a full-on remake for the next console generation. This remake was originally made for the Sega Saturn, but that version stayed in Japan. Luckily a PlayStation port came soon after, and publisher Working Designs was able to get that one localized and released in America, so that release is today’s subject. You can refer to my post about the original release for some basic info about the game. While the basic storyline and gameplay elements are pretty much the same, this is quite the ambitious remake. Practically everything feels at least a little bit different. There’s a lot more content here, and I think the characters really benefit from having a lot more dialogue. The main character Alex is way different, as before he was nearly a silent protagonist while in this game he speaks ...

This is a game that perhaps doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Jumping Flash! was an early PlayStation title, releasing in North America less than two months after the PlayStation console itself, and it is considered the first true “3D platformer” ever made! For a genre pioneer, you don’t hear a lot of talk about it. You may also notice that the box looks different from other PlayStation games I’ve talked about. At the start of the PlayStation’s lifespan in North America, it used long and thick cases like the one shown above instead of the small standard CD jewel cases that became the norm. These long boxes came in a few different forms, some being large jewel cases like the Sega CD and Sega Saturn, while others were made partially of cardboard with art actually printed right on the box. Although it may be the first 3D platformer, it’s still quite different from almost all others, because the action takes place entirely in a first-person view! You play as a robotic bunny named Ro...