Sam's video game collection essentials

If you’ve been to a lot of parties in the past decade (with young adults especially), there’s a pretty decent chance you’ve witnessed groups of people playing games on the TV that they play using their smartphones. In that instance, you most likely saw them playing something made by “Jackbox Games”. Before smartphones took over the world, those developers first rose to prominence with trivia games for home computers, a series called “You Don’t Know Jack”. The first game in this series was released in 1995, and there would be many entries in the next several years before it went dormant after 2003. What I have here is the first instance of You Don’t Know Jack getting released on a home console, which happened in 1999. The multiplayer-oriented gameplay made it a natural fit for consoles. This entry is basically a port of “You Don't Know Jack Vol. 3” with various changes, such as including questions from a couple other entries. The rules of You Don’t Know Jack vary between entries. Th...

This is the second game in the futuristic racing series called Wipeout. The first game was an early title for the PlayStation (and later ported to Sega Saturn), launching very soon after the console hit store shelves in the West. I’ve skipped over it, because to me it’s just a decent game at best that’s not very remarkable. This game takes place in the year 2097 and features futuristic floating anti-gravity vehicles in a racing competition. Like Mario Kart, there are items that you can pick up during the race that you can use to gain an upper hand. Sometimes these are weapons that directly attack opponents, while others are defensive in nature or give your vehicle a power-up of some kind.  This is one of the many examples of a video game sequel that greatly improved on the foundation of the original. Practically everything about Wipeout XL is better than the first game, with improvements such as more content, better controls, and perhaps most importantly split-screen multiplayer. (...

Here’s another quirky rhythm game from the people who made PaRappa the Rapper. This one has a very minimalist visual style, using a black background and squiggly white lines illustrating everything (which there’s not much of). You play as Vibri the rabbit, who happily walks along a long white ribbon as a song plays. Certain beats in the music will cause some kind of obstacle to appear. There are four basic obstacles that are each represented by one of four buttons. There are also more complex obstacles which are a combination of two of the basic ones, and these require pressing both of the associated buttons. For example, a block requires the L1 button, a pit requires the down button, but a block-shaped pit requires pressing both L1 and down. Messing up can devolve Vibri into a frog and then a worm, but playing well results in her being dressed up like a queen. There’s not a lot of content in Vib-Ribbon, with only a handful of songs. But that’s because of this game’s signature feature…...

Here we have a truly marvelous and totally unique RPG from developer “tri-Ace”, whose founders first worked on Tales of Phantasia on the Super Famicom and then went on to form their own studio. Valkyrie Profile probably technically qualifies as a JRPG, but it’s so incredibly unique that saying so doesn’t give you a good idea at all of what the game is actually like, and even future games in its own series don’t even truly resemble it.  As you may guess, this game is loosely based on Norse mythology. The main character Lenneth is a valkyrie, who serves Odin and recruits newly-deceased warriors to fight in a war waged by the gods with the ultimate goal of saving their home Asgard from destruction.  The basic gameplay loop of Valkyrie Profile involves a limited schedule. There are a limited number of “Periods” in the game until the final battle (something the game makes very clear), and performing certain actions such as entering a dungeon or recruiting a warrior take up one or m...

This game is the sequel to Umihara Kawase for Super Famicom which I covered previously. The basic premise and gameplay are the same, so for more info on that, please refer to that post . What I have here is actually the second version of this game released, hence the “Second Edition” in the title. This update adds a few levels and tweaks a few things such as removing product placement and fixing glitches.  This game is great fun for the same reasons as the first game, with the complex physics engine that lets you use your fishing line to pull and fling yourself every which way to your heart’s delight. The biggest difference here is that the level design seems more focused on hazards and a little less so on enemies. You’re more likely to see tricky level layouts that require you to masterfully utilize your fishing line rather than a bunch of enemies you need to defeat or escape from, though there certainly are some enemies here and there. Like the first game, there’s a “branching pa...

This is one of the most popular PlayStation games from the very early part of its lifespan. And it was a great early example of the possibilities granted by 3D graphics which were finally now the new standard for home consoles. Twisted Metal is classified as a “vehicular combat game”. It’s a type of game where you control a motor vehicle with access to weapons, and the goal may not actually be reaching some kind of finish line, but rather to destroy stuff. There were games before this which could be placed in this category, but I’m pretty sure Twisted Metal took this concept in a different direction than what was seen previously. In this game, you’re typically in some kind of arena without a track to follow, and you can freely drive around trying to find and shoot opponents. There are a nice variety of different vehicles which players can choose from. They all have a weak basic machine gun that never runs out of ammo, but better weapons can be found scattered throughout each level, so ...

Here’s a case of “How the heck did this actually get released in America?” This game features retro-looking 2D graphics at a time when the next generation of consoles featuring impressive 3D graphics was bursting onto the scene. It’s based on the Dragon Warrior series which wasn’t especially popular in America, and a new mainline entry hadn’t even come out there in years. It’s a dungeon-crawling roguelike, which was not a popular or well-known genre at all back then in the States. And yet, here we are. According to the internet, it happened because the translation team wanted to make it happen and worked on it for less pay than normal.  The main character of this game is Torneko, a shopkeeper who was one of the protagonists from Dragon Quest IV. This game is part of the “Mystery Dungeon” series, and the first game also featured Torneko. I previously covered the second game, Mystery Dungeon 2: Shiren the Wanderer, which had nothing to do with Torneko or Dragon Quest, but they decide...

This is a game that I’ve owned for years, but unlike a lot of other games I’ve talked about recently, this is one that I’ve freshly played, as I beat it for the first time just this past year! If this game looks a lot like Fire Emblem, there’s a good reason for that. The creator of Fire Emblem left the company after the fifth entry, Thracia 776, and then went on to develop this game! It is, for all intents and purposes, a Fire Emblem game in all but name. It was originally to be called “Emblem Saga”, and Nintendo thought that the game was too similar and took legal action on copyright grounds. While there were some concessions, such as a name change and some fees paid, TearRing Saga was ultimately allowed to exist. And that was actually quite significant for the gaming landscape, as it set a precedent for creators to make similar spiritual successors for other companies if they wind up changing employers. The storyline isn’t anything all that unique, with a typical sort of medieval fan...

The third game in the “Tales of” JRPG series was originally called Tales of Eternia in Japan, with “Eternia” being the name of the world the game takes place in. For the English release, they changed the name to “Tales of Destiny II” to emphasize that the games are in the same series, even though the stories of the two games aren’t connected. This would become confusing later because Tales of Destiny went on to get an actual direct sequel. For that reason, fans like me almost always refer to this game by its original title. This game places you in control of a hunter named Reid who is friends with a farmer girl named Farah, and their simple rural lifestyle is interrupted when one day a mysterious ship crash lands nearby. As the two go to investigate, they meet Meredy, a mysterious young girl who speaks a foreign language and seems to be trying to warn them about something. Reid and Farah seek out their scholarly friend Reid as they try to figure out how to communicate with Meredy and h...

After the success of the second “Tales of” game, instead of planning the third entry right away, Namco saw fit to completely remake the original game on PlayStation hardware, with impressive results. Of course, I already covered the original release of Phantasia, so you can go check out that post for some basic info about the game. Practically everything in PlayStation Phantasia has been reworked, and the game borrowed and built on some elements from Destiny in this process too. The graphics have a different style, with the characters more resembling those from Destiny. The game also took the concept of frivolous conversations on the world map introduced by Destiny and brought it a step further, very close to what would become a Tales series staple. Now, when on the world map, you can hit the “select” button, and the portraits of one or more of your characters will appear and speak. So now you can see different characters have amusing conversations with each other, and their portraits...

This is the second game in Namco’s long-running “Tales of” series, and the first one to be released in America. I previously covered the first game, Tales of Phantasia , for Super Famicom. Tales is one of those series where the games generally are completely independent of each other, so Tales of Destiny takes place in a different world with different characters. Although two characters from Phantasia do make a cameo appearance for a quiz minigame. In this game you play as Stahn Aileron, a sword-wielder with big and long yellow hair. As the game begins, he’s seeking adventure and stows away on an airship. He is discovered and forced into manual labor, but then the ship is attacked by a bunch of monsters. In the chaos, Stahn goes around looking for a weapon (not sure why he didn’t bring one), and he stumbles across a sword…that talks!! He says his name is Dymlos and that talking swords like him are called “Swordians”. As Stahn and Dymlos escape, a new adventure begins as they quickly ru...

Here we have what is probably Konami’s most revered RPG. It’s a direct sequel to the first game, taking place a few years later, and you’ll see some familiar faces, but you play as a different main character and there are a lot of newcomers. You start out as a young member in the army of a kingdom called Highland. But turns out the prince of Highland is up to no good and wants to carry out a bloody invasion, so you and your best friend Jowy flee, and get involved with some mercenaries including a couple familiar faces from the first game, and the plot takes off.  Suikoden II has much in common with the previous game. There are again over 100 characters to recruit and a base for them to live in. The basics of battle are quite similar, with some tweaks such as being able to equip up to three runes simultaneously. There are also occasional grid-based strategy battles that more resemble a game like Fire Emblem.  You can really see an extra level of polish when compared to the firs...

I have talked so much about Konami already in this series. By the mid-’90s they had made quite a name for themselves, but one genre they hadn’t dabbled in very much was RPGs. They had made Madara 1 and 2 on the Famicom and Super Famicom, games based on a manga series, but that was it. Suikoden was to be their first RPG that would get a worldwide release, and it would be one of the early PlayStation RPGs before a huge tidal wave of them came crashing down. This RPG is an interpretation of the classic Chinese novel “Water Margin” which was written in the first half of the last millennium. In fact, that’s what the name “Suikoden” means, and I guess a foreign word made for a better title for an RPG than the lame-sounding “Water Margin”.  I want to comment for a moment on the game’s front cover, as this is one of those amusing examples of when publishers in the ‘90s felt the need to change a game’s box art to be more friendly to American gamers at the time. What you see on the instructi...