There’s something ironic about Jurassic Park the movie showcasing cutting-edge rendering technology while Jurassic Park the arcade game has graphics on the verge of being extinct.
It’s summer 1994. Arcadegoers have already had two years to enjoy the slick untextured polygons of Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter birthed the 3D fighting genre a year later, and the hot new thing as of March is the stunning Daytona USA. Those texture-mapped 60fps polygons made jaws drop around the world and teased a graphical standard that wouldn’t be matched at home until at least the millennium (arguably longer).
I love a good old-fashioned console war. There’s nothing quite like two evenly matched competitors going toe-to-toe, especially the players are always the winners with great exclusives, tech being pushed, and aggressive pricing. And, in my opinion there’s never been a finer tussle than the early 90s Sega Mega Drive vs Super Nintendo showdown.
In retrospect the whole thing was very silly, with earnest debates about the merits of Blast Processing and magazine letter pages showcasing crayon drawings of Sonic decapitating Mario. But playing Castlevania: Bloodlines (aka Castlevania: The New Generation in its crappy censored PAL version) brought all that back.
The game comes across as a direct response to Super Castlevania IV, showing that whatever wizardry the SNES could pull off, the Mega Drive could match it. What results is a masterclass in 16-bit environmental design: each level crammed full of tiny and fun details.
When wolves howl windows shatter; you knock the heads off screen-sized statues to create paths; see your reflection in the water below you, platform in a circular pattern around the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and battle bosses with huge, detailed sprites. I already knew Konami’s Mega Drive team were some of the best in the business, but in Bloodlines you can’t toss a vial of holy water without hitting some cool little detail.
The best bit comes late on in Dracula’s Castle (more like Dracula’s AirBnb as this time he’s renting out ‘Castle Proserpina’ in Whitby). In one stage the game splits into three separately scrolling parallax layers, with all sprites sliced between them. This allows you to make impossible jumps and feels like something more out of a modern artsy indie platformer than a mid-90s Mega Drive game.
This rightly stands alongside hall-of-famers like Gunstar Heroes, Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Contra: Hard Corps as pushing the base Mega Drive to its limits. In many ways the distinct Mega Drive color palette feels more appropriate for a Castlevania game than the SNES’s and it feels like a faint shame this is the sole entry in the series on the platform.
Bloodlines is also the final game in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, which I’ve been working through for the last two years. As someone who’d only dabbled in the series before this it’s been a fun and educational ride through a series of games that always try to push the technical limits of what’s possible on old hardware.
My favorite of the bunch was definitely Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, which ranks among the best 8-bit games I’ve ever played. But Bloodlines impressed the hell out of me and I enjoyed it a lot more than Super Castlevania IV.
With the bedrock of the franchise done and dusted I’m looking forward to moving onto Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. Good times ahead!
“This story is dedicated to all those cyberpunks who fight against injustice and corruption every day of their lives”. So begins the excellent Snatcher and I think we can all agree those words are as true today as they were when first committed to a floppy disc back in 1988.
I played Snatcher in my first flush of Kojima fandom in the run-up to the release of Metal Gear Solid 2 in 2001. That’s a dim and distant memory now, but I remembered it being a damn good time.
Nearly 20 years on from that initial playthrough and my opinion has shifted. Snatcher is 100% incredible. It’s easy for cult classics like this to get over-hyped simply because accessing them is tough: the only English language version was released on the Mega CD in 1994 and it sold terribly (copies now go for somewhere between £400-800 depending on quality). This one earns every single bit of praise it gets.
Set in 2047, you play detective Gillian Seed who’s tasked with rooting out the Snatcher menace that’s causing panic in Neo Kobe City. The story is Blade Runner x Terminator, but the fact that it wears its influences on its sleeve means it comes across as more homage than rip-off.
I LOVE that Random Hajile is an anime Sting from David Lynch’s Dune.
Gameplay is effectively a visual novel with a couple of bells and whistles bolted on top and 95% of the game is selecting menu options and reading dialogue. Still, the puzzles are creative, well designed and require just enough lateral thinking to tickle you into feeling like a genius (plus it’s been long enough since I played it that I’d forgotten all the solutions).
But Snatcher really shines in its writing, acting and especially in its translation. The game is hilarious and weird – with its side conversations about stuff like floating pizza, genetically engineered pets, searching for missing girls under rugs, a constant willingness to break the fourth wall and Gillian’s inexplicable (and unquenchable) horniness. Most comedy games try too hard and fail, but Snatcher nails the tone time and time again and I laughed out loud a lot.
Most of that is down to Kojima’s idiosyncratic sense of humor, with the bonkers situations and conversations having his fingerprints all over them. Beyond the gags, writing a game like this in 1988 is impressive stuff and there’s elements here that would recur throughout his future work. Though the core plot is full of his trademark twists and turns, the world-building is also stunning, each environment full of information that makes a technically static game world bristle with life.
But a large dollop of why Snatcher is so damn good is Jeremy Blaustein’s amazing translation. Each and every line is brimming with personality and while I’m sure the specifics of the text have been changed, what he’s replaced it with is solid gold. The game has a lot to read and it’s a credit to the translation that it’s all engaging. Sadly it was this inclination to fiddle with the script that caused Kojima to fall out with Blaustein after Metal Gear Solid – I’d love to peek into the alt-universe where we got a Blaustein-translated MGS2-4.
Even the voice-acting is good, which is faintly astonishing for a Mega CD game from 1994. Nobody’s going to be picking up any awards for their performance, but Jeff Lupetin and Lucy Childs are a great comedy double-act as the put-upon Gillian and cowardly Metal Gear.
When I was settling down to play Snatcher I expected a fun time, tempering my expectations with the fact that the core game is now 32 years old. It only took a couple of minutes for that to fade into the background – this could be released today as an indie/retro experience and people would rave about how great it is (and indeed, that sorta happened in the heavily Snatcher-influenced 2015 game 2046: Read Only Memories).
If you haven’t played it yet, grab yourself a Mega CD emulator and fire this baby up. It’s aged like a fine wine and is still up there with the best things Kojima has ever done. That it’s never been re-released on a modern platform is a crime – more people should play this!
Another entry in the long line of Capcom’s 2D fighters that I’m playing through justify spending too much on a fancy new arcade stick. X-Men: Children of the Atom is essentially the first in Capcom’s long-running ‘Vs’ series (even though the X-Men aren’t really ‘vs’ anyone here).
Compared to even a couple of games down the line, this feels a little bare bones. But the speed, basic mechanics and animation style that defined future games are all present (the sprite art is would still look good in Marvel Vs Capcom 2 six years later).
Though there’s just ten characters to choose from (and that includes some left-field choices like Spiral and Omega Red), each plays very differently. This new clutch of fighters is a nice contrast to the increasingly large gang of very similar shoto characters in Street Fighter so it’s neat to see Capcom expanding their repertoire of fighting styles here.
On top of that, the relative simplicity compared to later, more chaotic Vs games isn’t necessarily a bad thing. My six-year-old nephew had a great time button-bashing and leaping around about as Wolverine and Psylocke.
Sadly it’s not that much in single-player: you get ‘yer bog standard arcade mode that culminates in an unfun boss fight against Magneto in which he uses impossible to dodge attacks and frequently becomes invulnerable. The only tactic that reliably beat him was to play defensively and run the clock out.
Great stuff though. I really love this speedy CPS-2 aesthetic with the big chunky sprites.
Ended up at neat a pub that had a Street Fightermachine in the back. Got drunk and had a great time playing all night, rekindling some very old memories of times spent on a cabinet at the back of a record shop in my home town.
I was so jazzed about Street Fighter that when I got home late I ordered an arcade fight stick I definitely don’t need. With this little investment I figured I should take the opportunity to finally get good at Street Fighter II.
Read a couple of articles (and Shoryuken‘s excellent free beginner’s book, From Masher to Master: The Educated Video Game Enthusiast’s Fighting Game Primer) and decided to get in some serious training in the all time best version of the game, Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Now, after 27 years of playing Street Fighter II I have progressed from embarrassing to ‘merely’ bad. At least I can consistently do dragon punches now.
Anyway, I went through a bunch of daily training drill, practised fundamentals against the AI. Then I played a bunch of matches online on Fightcadeand got my butt kicked (though I won once… possibly because of lag). But though I’m getting my butt kicked, at least it’s being booted in a constructive manner. I’m counting this version as beaten because I finished the game with every character and got the Akuma fight at the end.
Incidentally, though Street Fighter II is now almost 30 years old , the gameplay is still very fun, it’s a design classic, has great music etc etc. I’m going to work my way through Capcom’s fighting output and get some use out of this arcade stick.
Pixel Hunted 