RELEASE DATE: 1992 and 1993

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Red Company / Hudson Soft (Air Zonk), Dual / Hudson Soft (Super Air Zonk)

BEST VERSIONS: TurboGrafx-16 (Air Zonk) and TurboDuo (Super Air Zonk)

The PC Engine and its global counterpart, the TurboGrafx-16, are both known for having some absolutely amazing shoot ‘em up games, and after playing a lot of them in this research project, I’d be hard-pressed to name one that’s better than Air Zonk.

That’s actually quite a surprise to me because my first reaction to this game was that it was just a Parodius-style horizontally-scrolling cute ‘em up starring a cybernetic version of Red Company’s bald caveman Bonk character, who’s better known in Europe as PC Kid and in Japan as the punnier PC-Genjin (which rhymes with “PC Engine” and essentially means “BC caveman,” get it?). Fittingly, the Japanese version of Air Zonk is called “PC Denjin,” where PC is an acronym for “Punkic Cyborgs” and Denjin further plays on the pun by roughly translating to “electric person” or “cyborg.”

And the nomenclature shenanigans also carry over to North America; naming the character “Zonk” is a play on “Bonk” since the Air Zonk protagonist is a flying cyborg from the future and the letter Z is at the end of the alphabet and Bonk, as we know, lives way back in the B.C. era. With all that jokiness, I couldn’t image that this would be the shoot ‘em up that would make me say, “wow, this is really the one to play on this platform!”

But Air Zonk is good because it’s not a typical shoot ‘em up. While the basic idea is pretty simple – Zonk is a cybernetic superhero who can fly through the skies like Astro Boy and blast bad guys as he tries to stop the evil King Drool descendent known as Count King Tamahgo Sandrovitch – the game’s cute yet edgy designs give Zonk a giant lightning bolt on his forehead and he and all of his Punkic Cyborg allies wear too cool for school power sunglasses. Once per level, one of these friends can be summoned to help Zonk in his mission, and they have names like Scud, Power Dump, Astra and Ripp… as well as the head-scratching sea urchin named Spike Lee and the curiously understated baseball named Bob.

And things get weird fast, because these friends can also merge with Zonk to unleash their own forms of havoc. One ally is literally a top hat-wearing bubblegum machine named Bubblican that equips Zonk with homing projectiles. Another is a robotic cow named Moo Moo that puffs up like a puffer fish and can merge with Zonk so he can shoot bottles of milk out of his arms. Ripp is a dog that can merge with Zonk and shoot the word “BOW” out at enemies in big bubble letters that bounce around the screen. Bob can turn Zonk into a baseball player, Mumbles can convert him into a power drill and Astra can turn him into a magician.

It’s not that Zonk isn’t plenty capable on his own, though; he begins each stage with a basic cannon and a sprite the size of Bonk from the Bonk’s Adventure games, complete with a large head. As he destroys enemies, he gathers small smiley faces that allow him to eventually summon his friends once he’s collected enough of them, but he can also blast open devices called Air Bones to unleash a variety of weapons, one of which makes him mini-sized while boosting his firepower and others of which allow him to equip lasers, missiles, rocket fists or a spread shot made up of Japan-themed playing cards. With the game’s second button, Zonk can also charge up a power shot or even cough up a screen-clearing bomb if you hold the charge down long enough.

The enemies are also suitably weird, ranging from robotic soldiers and missiles and mechanical sea creatures to literal piles of trash, rocket-powered fire hydrants, streetlamps and trays of food. Being a Bonk’s Adventure spinoff, there are of course robot dinosaurs, including a mechanical King Drool near the end of the game. But some of the other bosses are absolutely bizarre and almost defy description. One’s a flying building named Bakadon that unleashes serpent heads you have to destroy one at a time. Another is a floating domed battleship named Blue Hogan with a giant magnet strapped to its front. One villain is a football with snake heads on either end with a vulnerable spot that only appears when the two halves of the ball separate and attempt to snap shut on Zonk. There’s a tank-treaded sea creature named Mizura with visible organs that are being covered up by symbiotic jellyfish, and there’s an absolutely bizarre creature called Lulu Alien that’s aptly named. And that’s before you face the Zonk-like duo of Moon Head and Double Head, both of whom team up at one point to take you down.

Despite all of this strange stuff, however, Air Zonk is a joy to play because it’s fast, responsive, challenging and always changing things up. Unlike Coryoon and the Gates of Thunder/Lords of Thunder games (which are all also made by Red Company), Air Zonk never makes you feel beholden to a particular loadout and does a good job of ensuring that each level is doing something different both in terms of the superb graphical presentation and frantic onscreen action. As you take hits, you power down, but it’s easy to power back up or grab new weapons. You also don’t have to merge with your ally if you don’t want to; if you prefer, you can simply use the ally like an option to boost your firepower.

If there is a criticism to be made, it’s that the game’s fifth and final level is almost the length of the three levels that come before it combined and features a boss rush mode before getting to the final encounter. The difficulty spike is pretty tough and will eat up a lot of the lives you’ve earned beforehand. Fortunately, the game’s robust difficulty settings and infinite continues allow you to determine just how hard you want things to be by setting the difficulty to “mild”, “spicy” or “bitter,” which is a nice touch. (And for those who really want to bring the unpleasantness, there’s even a cheat code for a super hard mode.) You also can choose whether you’d like to select your own companions or have the game pick for you.

The original Air Zonk is absolutely wonderful and features a fantastic soundtrack and top-notch graphical presentation, complete with parallax-scrolling backgrounds and some pretty incredible moments that feel like the NEC hardware is being pushed to its limits despite never slowing down or making the sprites flicker. I even enjoy the little details, particularly how the cybernetic Zonk sheds his own skin when he dies, revealing the robotic terror underneath the friendly appearance.

But then there’s the sequel, Super Air Zonk: Rockabilly-Paradise, which is somehow simultaneously more and less impressive. The game’s new soundtrack ups the production values but loses some of its catchiness; the levels are bolder and brighter, but also flatter due to the lack of parallax scaling that made Air Zonk’s world feel so three-dimensional. The level design is more complex and varied, but also feels slower-paced and even tedious at times. The new allies also don’t feel quite as strange, and while they do give Zonk the ability to fling sushi and sashimi or to rock the stages with music notes that fly all around him, there’s nothing quite like the utterly odd fusions the first game offers. Super Air Zonk is also much, much easier than the first game. It’s still a fantastic shoot ‘em up that revels in being offbeat, but where I’d list Air Zonk as a game that absolutely must be experienced, the sequel is probably best reserved for those who can’t get enough of the experience.

Playing either game will set you back a lot if you’re trying to find the original editions; both are highly collectible and much easier to find for Japanese hardware than in their localized forms. Both games were available on the Wii’s Virtual Console, but with that service shut down, there’s no legal way to play them beyond getting your hands on a TurboGrafx-16 Miniconsole, which at least includes the original Air Zonk along with the first two Bonk games. Aside from those channels, emulation is the next best option.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

We’re going to talk about console and handheld visual novel-style adventure games and the shaping influence they had on the adventure gaming genre as they also evolved into other types of games such as murder mysteries, dating sims and more!

I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed!

In our last episode, I talked a little bit about the visual novel genre as we discussed Capcom’s Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, which debuted outside of Japan in 2005 on the Nintendo DS. I know it was the first game I ever really played in that style, and it honestly took me by surprise because I had no idea it was part of a much longer tradition of visual novels in Japan.

And I want to say right off the bat that the term visual novel is loaded because it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. The purest definition of a visual novel is a game in which the story is being told to the player with little deviation beyond perhaps some choice mechanics that have a bearing on where the story goes or how characters respond.

Some visual novels are pure stories. Some allow you to choose your own path through branching stories. Some involve romance which are also known as nakige or “crying games”, and some are adult eroge that have sex and nudity in them. Some are detective stories. Some include other styles of gameplay that might be part of a visual novel include role-playing, horror, strategy, puzzle-solving or minigames.

An academic article from 2021 titled “What is a Visual Novel?” by Janelynn Camingue, Elin Carstensdottir, & Edward F. Melcer examined 30 different definitions and 54 visual novels and attempted to craft a unified definition.

Here it is:

A Visual Novel (VN) is a digital narrative focused game that requires interactions where the player must be able to impact the story world or the story’s progression. The story and interactions are most commonly presented through a text box and often employ additional forms of interaction including menu choices—which often contain sets of actions that the player character can perform—or dialogue options representing the player character’s speech or thoughts. Crucially, VNs have On-Click Progression, where the player clicks, taps or presses a button to see the next part of the story. The aesthetics of VNs are most often conveyed through static images of characters, background art, sound effects (SFX) feedback, and soundtracks.

Whew! That’s a mouthful. So for our purposes, we’re going to look at visual novels in three particular styles: storyline adventures, detective adventures and dating simulators. And if a game or series hasn’t received a major release outside of Japan, I’m not going to provide much detail beyond a quick namecheck.

There’s another problem, too – I really can’t tell you what the first visual novel is. Some of the earliest proto-visual novels include Enix’s 1987 science fiction game Jesus, Hideo Kojima’s 1988 game Snatcher and System Sacom’s 1988 game DOME, which was part of its Novel Ware series. What most people seem to agree established the format more or less the way we see to it today is Chunsoft’s Sound Novel series, which began in 1992 with studio founder Koichi Nakamura’s Otogirisō.

Chunsoft, if you are not aware, has long been the co-developer the Dragon Quest games along with Enix, so this completely tracks. Chunsoft’s 1994 murder mystery game Banshee’s Last Cry and 1998 day in the life of eight characters game Machi followed in the same vein.

But remember how I mentioned before that many Japanese publishers tended to make adult-oriented eroge adventure games? Well, another studio named Leaf formed in 1995 and created a four-part “Leaf Visual Novel Series” starting in 1996 that included Shizuku, Kizuato, To Heart and the later Routes. Each of these was definitely geared towards a mature audience and Kizuato in particular is shockingly dark and violent. To Heart became the foundation for a popular series that spun off into anime, manga and audio dramas.

Also in 1996, a studio called ELF, best known for eroge adventure games like the Dragon Knight series and the Dōkyūsei dating sims, released a landmark science fiction visual novel called YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of this World that apparently featured such a compelling story that it was ported to the Saturn and Windows without the sex. I have not played it myself, but it was localized by Spike Chunsoft in 2019 for Windows and modern consoles, and it’s also been adapted as a manga and anime OVA.

Yet another eroge studio released a visual novel in 1997, and this one, a horror game this time, was called Moon – not to be confused with the game Moon: Remix RPG Adventure that we just discussed! While the name of the developer was Tactics, the team behind it jumped ship the next year to create the developer known as Key, which would go on to create 1999’s romantic games Kanon and 2000’s Air, both of which received sanitized releases after their initial adult versions shipped. Key went on to create the all-ages 2004 game Clannad, and it’s for this game we should pause and take a closer look, because Clannad is widely considered to be one of the best visual novels ever created.

The word Clannad is derived from the name of an Irish band that performed as a family known as the Clann of Dore, or Clannad for short, which caused the game’s writer to think the word meant “family.” And family is a major theme in the game’s story.

The game tells the story of a high school student named Tomoya Okazaki who begins the game in a toxic relationship with his abusive father following the passing of his mother. He meets a sickly girl named Nagisa Furukawa who is quite socially awkward and who is trying to restart the school’s drama club. Tomoya helps her and meets the four other girls who star in the game. This is the meat of the game, where you can pick different paths and explore the first half of the game, the School Arc, a fairly well-written social sim with some good character stories. If you enjoyed the social links in the Persona games, you’ll enjoy Clannad’s first half. One of the main objectives involves collecting items called “Orbs of Light,” and as you do so, you can unlock the second part of the game, the “After Story.”

And here’s the twist – the game shifts into the future where Tomoya and Nagisa are married, and what occurs in that future is one of the most emotionally affecting stories you’ll ever experience in a video game. Beyond the events that occur, you keep seeing glimpses of this place called the Illusory World, a realm Tomoya sees in visions that is inhabited by a lone girl and where he is a wandering spirit. This world has a spiritual and psychological connection to his story in the real one, and in order to see the game’s true ending, Tomoya has to come to understand its significance and collect the remaining Orbs of Light.

Clannad is a very long game – easily 40-50 hours long due to the need to complete every facet of the School Arc and then made longer by the need to replay the After Story to achieve the true ending. If you don’t want to bother with that sort of commitment, there’s an anime TV series from 2007-2009 that covers both arcs over 47 episodes and two OVAs. It’s well-regarded and worth watching even if you like the game, though some folks really seem to hate the particularly large and widely spaced eyes Nagisa and the other female characters have.

Key went on to create a long series of visual novels after Clannad, and their most recent one, the all-ages adventure Anemoi, actually comes out this month in Japan and centers around a man and his sister returning to their childhood home in rural Japan for the reopening of a time capsule buried ten years ago.

Another studio known for visual novels was KID, a video game developer that made a lot of action console games in the 1990s – including the cult classic Pepsiman! – before creating two very popular visual novel series that are known as the Memories Off series, which first launched in 1999 and is still going strong today with over a dozen sequels, prequels and spin-offs, and the Infinity series, which started in 2000 with Never 7: The End of Infinity and continued on into games including Ever 17: The Out of Infinity, Remember 11: The Age of Infinity, the spin-off 12Riven: The Psi-Criminal of Integral and the reboot Code_18.

Though these games are all science fiction titles, Ever 17, Remember 11, and Never 7 also have a thematic tie-in to the Zero Escape series by establishing the premise of trying to escape from enclosed places. This is not an accident; they share a writer, the incredible Kotaro Uchikoshi.

But let’s now turn to another visual novel series that can probably rival any of these games for popularity, and that’s the Science Adventure series, which begins with the 2008 game Chaos;Head and then was followed up by Steins;Gate in 2009. There are currently six main chapters in this series, and each of them is comprised of two words with a semicolon in between: Robotics;Notes, Chaos;Child, Occultic;Nine and Anonymous;Code. There’s also a new Steins;Gate sequel on the way with the name I guess will be Steins semicolon three question marks, which only a Japanese visual novel studio would think is a good name for a game.

The Science Adventure series is primarily developed by a studio called Mages and directed by Chiyomaru Shikura, who has also written the theme music and credits songs for the games. Suffice it to say he takes these games very seriously, and the mythology and lore that extend from them is pretty sprawling and way too complex to summarize here. In the first game, Chaos;Head, you play as a character in the Shibuya district in Tokyo who seems to be having a psychotic break seeing things that aren’t there. As you might expect, the story gets a lot crazier from that premise, and I don’t even want to try to explain what happens. Play it and find out!

Steins;Gate is the sequel, and while it takes place a year later in Akihabara, it’s a game about time travel and it’s by far the most popular entry in the series, with several spin-offs, a prequel and a sequel, and even a Famicom-style retelling. Steins;Gate is a great entry point into the series, and if you want to see if you’ll be up for the rest, it’s well worth your time. There’s also an anime adaptation if you prefer to watch it, and you won’t be disappointed if you do – over 24 episodes, it arguably tells the story better than the game and is widely considered one of the best anime series ever made, shifting gears about halfway through from really good to amazingly great.

There are a lot of other visual novels out there – more than I’d ever care to describe. But don’t worry – we’re not done yet! In fact, we’re just getting started as we now delve into a subgenre of the visual novel – detective adventure games!

Detective adventure games have long been a staple of the Japanese form of the adventure game genre, and whether you’re talking about Nintendo’s Famicom Detective Club, Riverhillsoft’s J.B. Harold Murder Club, Data East, WorkJam or Arc System Works’s lengthy Jake Hunter series, you’ll find that pretty much all of these games owe their style to one game in particular: Yuji Horii’s 1983 game The Portopia Serial Murder Case, which, as I’ve already mentioned, went on to not just establish the Japanese adventure game format, but also the basic mechanics for the JRPG.

Unfortunately, most of these games never made it outside of Japan, and while Riverhillsoft did port the first Murder Club to the DOS PC and the TurboGrafx CD in two very different versions in 1989 and 1990, that series has also largely remained in Japan aside from a couple of super obscure ports for the LaserActive format, both of which are essentially just FMV mysteries.

So, let’s jump forward to the 2000s, because this is the first time in which most American and European gamers got much of a chance to play the detective style of Japanese adventure games. We covered the Ace Attorney series in our last episode, and Phoenix Wright and his friends helped pave the way for even more mystery-style visual novels on the Nintendo DS as well as the PSP, 3DS and Vita down the road.

But there was another Nintendo DS game that came out in 2005 that offered a mystery to solve in visual novel style with some point and click adventure gaming puzzles thrown in: Cing’s Trace Memory, also known in Europe as Another Code: Two Memories. The premise of the game is that you’re a teenage orphan named Ashley Robbins who’s been raised by her aunt in suburban Seattle. But Ashley starts having nightmares about a traumatic murder and then receives a package from her father in advance of her fourteenth birthday. Inside is a device and a message telling her to come to Blood Edward Island. Ashley and her aunt travel there and Ashely meets a ghost boy named D who’s trying to understand why he’s dead.

The two begin exploring the Edward family mansion and learn the truth of Ashley’s memories as well as her family’s connection to the Edward family and more about D’s mysterious past. There’s a lot to uncover, including a device that creates fake memories, hence the name of the game. And there’s also a sequel on the Wii that was only released in Japan and Europe called Another Code: R – A Journey into Lost Memories which continues the story, and fortunately, both games received a 2024 remake on the Nintendo Switch released worldwide called Another Code: Recollection, though there are quite a number of changes from the original games.

Cing also released three Nintendo DS games that offered an interesting conceit – hold the system sideways, like a book! The first of these was 2007’s Hotel Dusk: Room 215, a detective story where former cop and current traveling salesman Kyle Hyde is stuck with several other people in a hotel out in the middle of nowhere and winds up investigating the staff and the other guests to solve the mystery of room 215. Once again, there are a few puzzles present, but the game’s mostly about following a fairly linear storyline where you mostly have to be careful not to antagonize the guests and earn a game over screen for making poor choices. In 2010, Cing released a sequel called Last Window: The Secret of Cape West in Japan and Europe with a more dynamic storyline, but otherwise following a similar structure.

And Cing also released a 2009 game in the same vein called Again in both Japan and North America, this time starring an FBI agent named Jonathan Weaver, or just “J,” who can use psychic powers to see scenes from the past. Unlike the other two games, which have a distinctive sketchy art style, Again uses digital scans of actors and looks more like a police procedural show. It’s not as awful as reviews of the era might lead you to believe, but it’s certainly not great.

Three other handheld games in a similar vein are BeeWork’s 2006 release Touch Detective, also known as Mystery Detective in Europe, Capcom’s 2010 game Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective and the indie game Corpse Party, which first appeared on the PC-88 in 1996 as an RPG Maker game and eventually was ported to the PSP, 3DS, mobile devices and modern consoles in the 2010s by Team GrisGris and the developer now known as Mages.

Touch Detective is the oddball of the bunch mechanically; it’s a point and click adventure game with really stylized cute character designs and a point and click stylus-driven interface. I really should have included it in the last episode, but because it’s a Nintendo DS game with some very chatty characters and inner monologues, it tended to get lumped in with the Phoenix Wright and Another Code games in reviews of the era.

The premise is that that you’re a young girl detective named Mackenzie who has an affinity for touching objects to aid her powers of deduction. The first Touch Detective offers four cases plus a bonus case. The second game, titled Touch Detective II ½, debuted in 2007 on the DS, but the third was initially only released in Japan on the 3DS until a compilation including all three games plus a few other bonuses was released on the Switch in 2022 with upgraded graphics. If you like point and click adventure games with a very heavy Japanese feel, these are worth your time!

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective looks like a point and click adventure game due to its pixel art characters and action sequences, but it’s similar to the Phoenix Wright games in some ways – no surprise since it’s by the same creator, Shu Takami. The premise of the game is that you’re a ghost named Sissel who doesn’t know why he was murdered, but who’s tasked with investigating and then preventing other murders by using his ghostly powers to go back in time 4 minutes and then apply his haunting “ghost tricks” to the environment to change the outcome of the event.

It’s a neat game that’s told over 18 chapters and which includes some adventure-style puzzle solving as well as a lot of dialogue amidst a ton of very memorable characters. If you’ve missed this one, play the 2023 remaster available on modern consoles, because it’s an improved experience overall that plays nicely on larger screens.

One more game in the same vein is Corpse Party, which, as I mentioned, started out as a 1996 RPG Maker title in Japan but which was eventually remade for Japanese audiences for Windows in 2008 as Corpse Party: BloodCovered and for the PSP in 2010 in a version called Corpse Party: Blood Covered… Repeated Fear. Later versions, such as the 3DS and mobile games and the modern console remake, are based on these remakes.

While the original game was an RPG, the newer games were adjusted into being adventure horror titles with lengthy dialogue sequences, multiple endings and lots of side story content to explore other characters. The 2011 sequel Corpse Party: Book of Shadows is actually mostly just a bunch of additional side stories taking place within the same storyline as the main game, but then setting up an epilogue for the 2014 sequel, Corpse Party: Blood Drive.

But as it happens, those games are all considered part of the same story; there’s a quasi-official 2013 fan game by Team GrisGris and Grindhouse called Corpse Party 2: Dead Patient. Mages and Team GrisGris are also planning to release an official sequel this year called Corpse Party II: Darkness Distortion scripted by original creator Makoto Kedōin that will offer a new entry point for those who haven’t played the original games.

There is some debate about which genre the Corpse Party games belong in since the games have their roots in the JRPG genre. But the gameplay of the most modern versions of the games definitely feels most like the visual novel genre. The original game and Blood Drive both have do have overhead sequences where you maneuver chibi-ized versions of the characters through the haunted school in more of an RPG style, but the games frequently break away into sequences with static backgrounds, character art and text.

I won’t even try to explain the story in these games – each installment is lengthy and there are lots of characters and plotlines to experience – but what I will say is that you play as Japanese high schoolers exploring a haunted school called Heavenly Host Elementary School that once stood where the high school Kisragi Academy now exists, and a magical incantation winds up transporting some students to the ruins of the old school in a spiritual world filled with the bodies of other students who had also found their way into Heavenly Host and who’ve been forgotten in the real world. The place is haunted by a girl in a red dress named Sachiko Shinozaki who serves as the original game’s antagonist, and once you get past the original content from the first game, things get very twisty-turny with all the character stories involved. The characters are all more or less anime and manga tropes and it’s very easy to get on the path for a bad ending instead of the true one. That’s one reason why some fans prefer to just watch the anime adaptations before playing the games.

But Corpse Party’s mixture of detective work, horror and character relationships doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and there are many other games in the same vein, many of which come from a run of titles created by Spike Chunsoft by Kotaro Uchikoshi and Kazutaka Kodaka.

OK, so a quick history lesson. Chunsoft is a long-time Japanese publisher that was responsible for the Sound Novel series we covered earlier, but in 2012, it became Spike Chunsoft when it was combined with another publisher known as Spike, which was founded in 1989 as Mizuki by a former Enix employee and which took on the name Spike in the mid-1990s as it absorbed an influx of people from Human Entertainment. Sadly, Spike didn’t pick up Kono Hifumi, the director of Clock Tower – he went to a company called Nude Maker to make, you guessed it, the Xbox mech simulator with a $200 controller, Steel Battalion. His colleague Goichi Suda – also known as Suda51 - went on to form Grasshopper Manufacture and some of the other team members went to Sandlot to start creating niche titles like Robot Alchemic Drive and Earth Defense Force.

But many of the Human Entertainment folks wound up at Spike, which was the developer of games like Lupin the 3^rd on the Saturn, the King of Colosseum and DragonBall Z Budokai Tenkaichi games on the PlayStation 2 and the publisher of the Way of the Samurai and Kenka Bancho series. Spike also continued Human Entertainment’s Fire Pro Wrestling games.

In 2005, an entertainment and software corporation called Dwango bought both Spike and Chunsoft, and the two created several parallel visual novel-style series. Chunsoft’s creator Koichi Nakamura produced a complex live action FMV visual novel called 428: Shibuya Scramble, which was a spiritual successor to their previous Sound Novel game Machi, a 1998 non-linear visual novel on the Saturn in Japan that was notable for its large city to explore and eight different characters simultaneously experiencing five days of their lives, all depicted with live action photographs. 428: Shibuya Scramble takes place over a ten-hour period told over one-hour segments and features five main characters trying to solve a mystery, though each has a different approach and tone to their story. Even wilder, there are reportedly 87 different possible endings from over a hundred different story paths, which means that this game has loads of replay value. And since it features photography rather than anime characters, it feels more like an interactive TV show, though most of the scenes are stills, not video.

The game also included a bonus scenario about a character named Canaan that was unlocked by achieving the true ending, authored by Type-Moon’s Kinoko Nasu with character designs by Takashi Takeuchi. The Canaan story shifts to a more conventional anime look and even spawned an anime television sequel series. And the live action director Jiro Ishii went on to Level-5, the makers of the Professor Layton series, to produce a Japan-only 2012 game called Time Travelers for the 3DS, PSP and PlayStation Vita featuring 3D anime-style character FMV sequences that fit into a massive flowchart of choices dictating how the game unfolds.

In 2009, Chunsoft’s write4 Kotaro Uchikoshi launched another series that became a really big deal on handheld platforms: 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. The premise is that you are a college student named Junpei who’s been drawn into a deadly competition called the Nonary games along with eight other people and run by a character named Zero. The game’s broken up into escape room-style segments to provide puzzles and action and visual novel-style sequences to advance the story. The title pretty much tells you everything you need to know – there are nine hours in which to find a door with the number 9 on it, and since you’re all aboard a sinking cruise ship with sealed exits and windows and will blow up if you try to escape, you have no choice but to play along.

I will not attempt to explain the plot, as it’s not only quite serious and complex, but also far more fun to experience in the game itself. But I’ll mention that the game has two sequels: 2012’s Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward and 2016’s Zero Time Dilemma, which is actually more of an interactive movie than a visual novel and draws some clear inspirations from Time Travelers. All three received amazingly high reviews from many publications and are considered some of the best games of the 21^st century. If you haven’t played them, you absolutely must.

Another popular visual novel series that debuted alongside the Zero Escape games began in 2010 with Spike’s Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, written by Kazutaka Kodaka, who’d previously worked on Clock Tower 3, the Jake Hunter games and a video game adaption for the Detective Conan manga series.

During a call for new pitches at Spike, Kodaka came up with a battle royale killing game concept called DISTRUST where 15 teenagers would kill each other over a 7-day period. The pitch started out as a visual novel but gradually added in the elements for which the series would become known – trials, deduction minigames, investigations, anime trope characters and a mysterious authority figure with black and white halves – originally a human-like robot named Phantom who looked like a boy on one side and a visible anatomy doll on the other. The concept gradually morphed into the first Danganronpa game and Phantom evolved into the series mascot, the evil black and white robot bear Monokuma.

I remember playing the original Danganronpa game on the PS Vita in 2014 and first wondering if it was a Persona 4 knockoff with some Phoenix Wright trial elements because, at least superficially, it felt like a weird fusion of those two games combined with some ideas from the Japanese film Battle Royale about high school students killing each other on a remote island. Even so, the game surprised me with its strong sense of comedy atop its bleak backstory and surprisingly strong main characters, and I was absolutely stunned by the ending, which contained some pretty amazing twists explaining how the “Ultimate” students who’d been selected to attend the prestigious Hope’s Peak Academy had been drawn into a killing game without any knowledge of the craziness going on in the world outside. I think it’s pretty safe to say that if you go into Danganronpa without knowing anything about the game or the anime and manga it ultimately spawned, you will be absolutely shocked when the game drops its last set of twists in the final chapter.

The same is true for the first sequel, and one of the first titles for Spike Chunsoft once they merged together in 2012, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. The sequel has an entirely new cast of characters – well, one of them looks familiar and certainly a lot fatter than before, but keep playing! – and absolutely jerks you around with a new killing game set on an island resort and a sort-of secondary antagonist named Nagito Komaeda who is both supremely lucky and also completely nuts, often throwing a wrench into the gears of any attempt to make progress in the game. Once again, there’s a big twist towards the end which is completely wild, and I honestly love the second game as much or maybe even a little more than the first. Again, go in knowing as little as possible and you’ll really enjoy it, and that includes skipping the sidestory action game Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls until you’ve finished the first two.

The third game, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, came out in 2017 and it’s a true love it or hate it sequel, featuring some of the best characters and moments in the entire series but also some of the worst contrivances and plot twists. It’s super self-aware and serves as a broader commentary on society’s obsession with competitive reality show-style games sacrificing young people for entertainment. Suffice it to say that this sequel is basically non-canonical where the other games are concerned and doesn’t need to be played if you don’t enjoy what it does early on to apply its first big twist.

Spike Chunsoft has made a few spin-offs to capitalize on the popularity of the anime and manga extensions of the series, and there’s also a new game coming up this year called Danganronpa 2×2 that’s essentially an alternate take on the second Danganronpa game. I personally don’t have high hopes for it, as I feel the series pretty much did everything it can do, but for those who can’t get enough, I guess it’s an option!

Two other Spike Chunsoft games I want to mention are 2019’s AI: The Somnium Files and 2023’s Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, both of which are new enough that I don’t feel a lot of need to describe them – you can easily play them right now on modern consoles or Steam!

AI: The Somnium Files is a visual novel by Kotaro Uchikoshi that alternates between reality and dream worlds called Somnia. As Kaname Date, a detective who delves into dreams to try to solve a murder of a young woman who’s had her left eye removed, you and your cybernetic AI-powered eye Aiba investigate a trail of clues leading you down five different paths that are broadly categorized in the left and right routes depending upon where you take your investigation.

It’s a really cool story with excellent 3D sequences, great voice acting and a lot of twists and turns to suit its nonlinear story. There are even two sequels, 2022’s AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative, which partially takes place six years after the first game with a new main character, and 2025’s No Sleep for Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files, which takes place between the two games as a side story.

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is co-written by Kazutaka Kodaka and features a detective named Yuma Kokohead who’s followed around by a cute spirit named Shinigami solving mysteries together. Much like AI, the game moves between the real world and an imaginary one, in this case a place called the Mystery Labyrinth which is a visual representation of the mysteries that need to be solved. This game plays much more like Danganronpa, though, with Reasoning Death Match sequences, evidence-gathering and minigames to get through portions of the labyrinth. Though it has some of the same psycho-pop neon-infused look and chaotic energy of the Danganronpa series, Rain Code has 3D models and much more exciting animations. Yuma Kokohead has a piece of hair sticking up in the form of a question mark on his head, and Shinigami transforms Sailor Moon style into a scantily-clad goth girl in the Mystery Labyrinth. It’s an enormous game with dozens of hours of mysteries and a great blend of humor and drama.

By the way, Rain Code was developed by Too Kyo Games, which in Japanese means “Too Crazy Games” and it was formed by Kazutaka Kodaka, Kotaro Uchikoshi and the Danganronpa composer Masafumi Takada and character artist Rui Komatsuzaki. And they’ve since released another game in the same vein in 2025 called The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy that has 100 different endings, a school setting full of over-the-top characters and a squishy, sarcastic robot mascot character named Shirei. If that sounds like a wonderful fusion of 428: Shibuya Scramble and Danganronpa along with some tactical RPG combat to boot, then yep, you’re more or less on the money in thinking the game was co-developed by Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi with art by Rui Komatsuzaki and music by Masafumi Takada. So, it’s pretty much guaranteed that if you enjoy any of the Spike Chunsoft games we’ve just discussed, you’ll love this one too!

I want to cover one more topic, and I’m going to keep it brief because I really have little experience with this subgenre of the visual novel – dating sims! But they’re an important style of game to discuss and, quite honestly, one of the most influential in their impact on other genres from farming sims like Harvest Moon to tactical strategy games like Fire Emblem: Three Houses to JRPGs like Persona 3, 4 and 5 to pretty much anything else involving romantic interactions with anime-style girls.

Before we dive in, I’m only going to cover a few notable titles from the 1990s that helped to establish the genre – I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about eroge or hentai or NSFW games or anything else in that vein because it’s far outside my interests, and I’m also not going to get too much into the games from the 21^st century. There are just too many!

I also want to take a moment to differentiate between dating sims and another subgenre of the visual novel known as otome, which means “maiden game.” Today, these two genres more or less look alike and it’s just a matter of selecting whether you want to play a game starring a boy or a girl who’s interacting with other characters, and both have strong roots in the bishojo tradition in Japan of products made for girls.

But dating sims have traditionally starred a male character in a harem anime sort of story where he had his pick of a variety of girls while otome games typically starred a female protagonist in a romance story that’s a bit more nuanced and which may or may not involve a large number of suitors. Dating sims are generally meant to project the feelings of the female player on the girls being seduced; otome games are meant to project the feelings of the female player on the protagonist as a self-insert and tend to go beyond mere seduction.

Of course, there are a lot of men in Japan who also enjoy dating sims and otome games, and they’ve also been quite popular outside of Japan with players of all genders, and particularly the LGBTQ+ community. And many of these fans are additionally interested in niche genres like Boy’s Love, Yuri, Amare, Joseimuke and Galge.

So, let’s start with dating sims, which are typically traced back to the 1991 game Princess Maker, which is actually not a dating sim at all, but a child raising simulation in which you are responsible for making parental decisions for an orphan girl during her adolescence and teenage years with the intention of preparing her to become the princess of a fantasy kingdom. In the first game, the daughter’s goal is to marry a prince, but the second game, released in 1993, includes the cringey element of being able to groom the daughter to become flawlessly perfect, avoid romance, and marry you, her adoptive father. Eww.

This game was developed by Gainax, the folks who brought us Neon Genesis Evangelion and FLCL among many other games and anime series, and it spawned a series that’s still producing games today - Princess Maker: Children of Revelation is currently in early access on Steam and planned for release later this year. But even though Princess Maker is not a dating sim per se, it established the framework under which many of the dating sims that followed would operate – your success with the various ladies in dating sims depends upon the actions you take, the gifts you give and the stats you raise.

As the player, your job is to maximize your chances for seduction by making the right moves to capture the heart of each girl you encounter, often amidst a time limit such as a schedule or set number of days. Some games allow you to go after multiple girls at once, and others prune your path more narrowly once you’re in a committed relationship.

The game that established many of these conventions is ELF Corporation’s 1992 eroge visual novel Dōkyūsei, which means “Classmates,” where you play as a male student on summer break wandering around different towns in Japan over a 22-day period, meeting fourteen different girls and trying to win their affections while also competing with suitors. While the game initially included explicit scenes and dialogue, ELF eventually released all-ages editions as well. And of course there was not only a sequel, released in 1995, but also an anime OVA series and a spin-off series called Kakyūsei, or “Underclassmates.”

Another notable dating sim is Tokimeki Memorial, or “Heartbeat Memorial,” a 1994 game by Konami that was released as an all-ages title from the start and thus became very popular in Japan. The premise is that you’re a first-year student at Kirameki High School looking for love and you not only have to keep the various girls you encounter happy, but watch out for someone souring on you and gossiping to their friends via a mechanic known as the “bomb” feature.

Interestingly, the scenario writer for the game was Koji Igarashi, who’d go on to work on the Castlevania series. While he got stuck working on a romance game, his girlfriend was working on Castlevania: Rondo of Blood. He would sneak into her office and play that game while asking her for tips on the romance game he was making. The success of Tokimeki Memorial allowed Igarashi to name his next project, which was of course Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. He didn’t work on the Tokimeki Memorial sequels, nor was he involved in the series’ shift to otome in 2002 when Konami released Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side, a sidestory series popular enough to have had its most recent sequel released in 2021.

But the entire otome genre owes its existence to the 1994 game Angelique, created by Keiko Erikawa, the wife of Yoichi Erikawa, with whom she’d co-founded the development studio Koei. That’s right, yet another adventure gaming power couple – and Keiko Erikawa is essentially the Japanese Roberta Williams! Angelique was intentionally created to serve the market of female gamers, and to create it, Keiko Erikawa had built a team called Ruby Party made entirely of female game developers. While Koei’s Shibusawa Kou had to step in to help guide the inexperienced team on the first Angelique, Ruby Party soon became one of the main otome game development teams, and their strategy was pretty simple: create fun games and then create mixed media to go along with them such as manga, drama CDs and anime OVAs. Many other visual novel, dating sim and otome developers followed that same playbook to broaden their appeal to women. And Ruby Party’s Neo Romance series of otome, dating sims and role-playing games established a strong market for games targeted at women in Japan.

Sega, seeing the potential for a mixed media dating sim, began developing a concept first proposed by Oji Hiroi for a theater-based cross-genre game called Sakura Taisen, also known as Sakura Wars, featuring tactical role-playing, visual novel adventure sequences and dating sim elements. Sega wanted the game to be a big hit for the Saturn and commissioned the famous manga artist Kōsuke Fujishima to design the characters and designed the story like an anime television series, complete with an animated intro set to the rousing song “Geki! Teikoku Kagekidan,” which cheers on the game’s Imperial Combat Revue, a troupe of actors who also double as demon-fighting mecha pilots. Their best fighters are the Flower Division, made up of actresses with spiritual powers. As Imperial Navy Ensign Ichiro Ogami, you double as an usher and eventual manager of the theater, and you can also choose which of the girls you’d like to romance as a cataclysmic war with Satan himself gradually escalates in the background.

Sega wanted Sakura Taisen to have a broader appeal than just the bishojo audience, and thus the game really plays up the action. The game was popular enough in Japan to spawn a long-running series and many tie-in media and also to inspire other games fusing visual novel and dating sim elements with role-playing and strategy mechanics. Even so, Sega never saw a market for it outside of Japan until 2010 when they finally released the fifth game, 2005’s Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love in North America for the PlayStation 2 and also in Europe on the Wii. The sixth game, 2019’s reboot simply titled Sakura Wars, got a global release, though it was reportedly not a huge seller.

I mentioned Leaf’s 1997 game To Heart earlier when we discussed their Visual Novel series, but let’s come back to this game again for a moment because it wound up being a big hit in Japan, spawning an anime series and several sequels and remakes. The original PC version was an eroge game, but the console version stripped out the adult content and was better off for it, broadening the audience and offering players a chance to romance ten different girls – including a robot! – and play some minigames amidst a busy school day schedule very similar to what you’d see in the later Persona 3, 4 and 5 games. A more recent version from Aquaplus was released in 2025 under the name ToHeart with no space between the words, but fans of the original seem to be lukewarm on the choices made in the new one.

Of course, To Heart wasn’t available outside of Japan until this recent remake, nor were a lot of the other games we’ve covered. But Red Company and Atlus’s 1998 PlayStation game Thousand Arms was released in North America, and though it’s a role-playing game, it’s best-known for including a dating sim system in which your main character, the womanizing blacksmith Meis Triumph, attracts a few female companions he has to take out on dates so he can increase his intimacy level with them. It’s a really goofy game that’s something of a deep cut for PlayStation-era RPG fans, but aside from Harvest Moon or the Private Actions in Star Ocean: The Second Story, I can’t think of too many other games from the era released outside Japan that included dating sim mechanics.

Let’s close out this section with one more game, the 1999 dating sim Kanon, Key’s first release and definitely an eroge with the same sort of unsettlingly cute anime girls you’ll see in Clannad. But as I mentioned, this game was liked well enough to justify all-ages versions when it hit consoles, and it, too, spawned a number of tie-in media, including anime, manga, light novels, a trading card game and drama CDs. Interestingly, Kanon is not quite as remarkable today as it was when it was released because it’s best-remembered as the game that established a lot of the modern anime visual style used in the genre and which popularized the calmer, slice of life storytelling often found in visual novels, dating sims and otome games. The story only has five paths and it’s not nearly as memorable as Key’s later games, but it and its dreamlike 2000 follow-up Air are still well-regarded as classics today.

We could talk about many other visual novels if we wanted to. One popular game is Doki Doki Literature Club, a freeware game that has since been released commercially and which is best played thinking that you’re just a male student trying to date girls in the book club. There’s the Nintendo DS launch title Sprung, which was reviled by reviewers at the time despite merely being a European ski resort take on the dating sim genre. There’s Hatoful Boyfriend, a game where you literally date birds, and there’s Christine Love’s visual novels Digital: A Love Story, Analogue: A Hate Story, Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story and…

My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress as Him and Now I Have to Deal with a Geeky Stalker and a Domme Beauty Who Want Me in a Bind!!, which is also known as Ladykiller in a Bind.

And those are just a small sampling of the many contemporary visual novels out there, many of which are now being authored by developers outside of Japan. There’s a particularly strong indie scene for LGBTQ+ visual novels and dating sims coming from all parts of the world with games like Butterfly Soup, and there are even parodic dating sims like Panzermadels: Tank Dating Simulator, the Trolley dating sequence in The Trolley Solution or the 2025 game Date Anything which, I’m told, completely misunderstands the genre and is mostly popular among people who don’t actually play dating sims.

One of the reasons for the proliferation of visual novels is that there are easy tools available to make them. In the old days, RPG Maker could be forced into it via plugins, but there are now commercial-grade tools like Visual Novel Maker, TyranoBuilder and Ren’Py with devoted communities and plenty of documentation to make it easy for anyone to make a visual novel and launch it on a modern marketplace. And while a lot of these games really aren’t that remarkable, there are a surprising number that are completely free and high in quality.

Now that we’ve non-exhaustively covered this frankly exhaustingly vast topic, I’m ready to move back to Western games and see how things evolved over the last 25 years as adventure gaming supposedly died and then came back to life. It turns out the rumors of the genre’s death were definitely exaggerated, but the last decade in particular has been an exciting time for the games to grow in commercial appeal!

So in our next episode, we’re finally going to talk about how games like Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, which is also known as The Indigo Prophecy, Microids’s adventure games including Amerizone: The Explorer’s Legacy, the Syberia games, Post Mortem and Still Life and Index+’s really wild Dracula: Resurrection series all moved us forward. And we’re also going to talk about the rest of the Quantic Dream library and Daedalic Entertainment as well as a few of the other European series of note.

And then we’ll bring things to a near-conclusion by talking about the influence of Telltale Games and indie studios like Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games, Yahtzee Croshaw’s Fully Ramblomatic Games, Crystal Shard, AGD Interactive, Clifftop Games and Grundislav Games, as well as a few more!

And when that’s all said and done, we’ll close things out with some perspective on why adventure games are still relevant today and why they’ve seen such a resurgence over the last decade. And I’ll also set things up for us to begin a new series to talk about another genre that features progression-based storytelling, lots of variety and a long tradition of evolution in gaming – the platform game.

If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.

And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!

I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRY

Before I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.

This week, I’m recommending Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, a 2024 game from Panik Arcade and Those Awesome Guys which is, essentially, Super Mario 64 meets Choro Q. I know, I know, I threw you a curveball there by invoking the name of an obscure Japanese game that actually was released in North America for the PlayStation 2 about little cars driving around. And yet that’s what we’re doing in Yellow Taxi – driving a cute yellow cab that can dash or flip as it gets airborne and use its momentum to get to places a taxi probably shouldn’t go, like the roofs of houses or mountain peaks or underwater. It’s built around a hub world with many different non-linear levels you can visit, each of which has objectives and collectibles. Most importantly, the game doesn’t include a jump button, so there’s a lot of puzzle-solving involved in figuring out how to get to those places you can see, but can’t easily visit.

The game takes heavy inspiration from Mario’s 3D outings. There’s a Wario-like character named Morio – spelled with an O – who guides you, and the incredible soundtrack by Jacob Lincke really needs to be listened to on repeat, because it both evokes various 3D Mario game tunes but also puts its own spin on them and creates something wild and new. I think the fact that the game’s designers are Italian and repurposing Mario for their own creation is also sort of cool.

This game’s normally $17 but each to find cheap – it’s $5.26 on Steam today, and I got it in a bundle on Fanatical for about 10% of that along with some other games! – and you’ll have a great time with it. I found myself playing it far longer than I thought I would, and its variety and “what are they going to do next?” sensibility really makes it fun to pick up and play when you need something sort of challenging, but unimposing.

SOURCES:

“What is a Visual Novel?” academic paper - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3474712

https://danganronpa.fandom.com/wiki/DISTRUST

https://otomekitten.com/glossary/

https://princessmaker.fandom.com/wiki/Father_Marriage_Ending_(PM2)

https://www.eurogamer.net/unfinished-symphony-castlevanias-keeper-speaks

https://www.famitsu.com/news/201506/29081240.html

https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/projectbook/koei/3

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

RELEASE DATE: 1991

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Masaya Games / NCS Corporation

BEST VERSIONS: Sega Genesis/Mega Drive

I’m not really into the grotesque H.R. Geiger aesthetic that many 1980s and 90s shoot ‘em ups featured, and Wings of Wor is easily one of the grossest of all of the games of the era, featuring a strange blend of biological body horror along with a jarring and quite distinct mechanical steampunk aesthetic. Given that the game stars a winged man who’s either an angel battling demons (in the Japanese original) or just a dude named Wor fighting mutants (in the localized edition), you can tell that the storyline wasn’t nearly as important to the developers as the look and feel, and though Masaya is also known for the bizarre muscle man-themed Cho Aniki series, this development team is actually primarily made up of people who worked on the Assault Suit series (known as Target Earth and Cybernator in North America) and Gley Lancer, which are far more conventional science fiction titles.

Oh, and the North American version of the game’s cover artwork? It’s by Boris Vallejo, the popular fantasy artist whose aesthetic also fits this tremendously odd Genesis/Mega Drive game.

Wings of Wor starts out simply enough. You select your difficulty level and control style and start off flying through a cave with a rather small, winged character armed with a spreadshot. The enemies are a little odd, but the speed is moderate and there’s nothing too crazy. But as things progress, you begin picking up power-ups that fill the screen with bullets. Stalactites start falling and turn out to be monsters. Trees begin leaping off the ground and ceiling and attacking you. Tooth-filled mouths start popping up out of holes in the ground. Enemies begin rushing you from the front while one slow-moving straggler attacks from behind. And then you face one of the ugliest mutant turtle creatures ever put in a video game.

Congrats. You’ve made it through about 3 minutes of the first level, and you’ve still got to face a fascinatingly grotesque cybernetic train before you even leave the caverns.

But that’s just how Wings of Wor goes. You’ll take off into the sky only to have the clouds start attacking you. You’ll dive into the water below and get swarmed by prehistoric fish from the darkest depths of the ocean. You’ll battle a pirate ship with a horned human’s bearded face on its masthead only to have the hull open up and reveal an even larger, more shriveled and mummified face within. You’ll enter a ghostly castle where you’re not only attacked by empty suits of armor, hails of arrows and fire-breathing gargoyles, but also brains with beefy legs hopping around and strange floating creatures that look like aborted fetuses. And that’s before you battle an anthropomorphic furnace with an armored lower jaw or head into a mechanical nightmare of a stage complete with a sentient rocket launcher, hands and faces emerging from the floors and ceiling, huge waves of horrific creatures trying to encircle you and a huge cybernetic boss that’s literally wearing its heart on its sleeve and shooting its blood platelets at you.

And yet even at this point in the game, the fifth stage is where things get really gross as you enter into an area I can only describe as the inside of some giant creature’s eyeball. It’s pink and veiny and moves around like you’re trapped in a gelatinous world while you’re attacked by floating skulls, horned eyeballs, menacing-looking insects and clumps of human heads. It is one of the most deeply unsettling stages I’ve ever faced in a video game, and the boss that concludes it, which is a limbless torso of a creature writhing above a phallic shaft of flesh, somehow feels toned down from the stage before it.

That the final stage is just a boss rush in the sky with yet another horrific creature at the end is a relief. Even the ending, which simply celebrates your victory as your character settles on a pedestal and then is shown as a state gazing off into the jagged mountains cutting into the sky, feels muted compared to the craziness that the game put you through.

As a shoot ‘em up, Wings of Wor does have a few decent ideas. The weapons systems are set by gems you pick up and absolutely fill the screen with energy pellets and it’s really just a matter of figuring out which pattern works for you since the weapon shoots quickly and offers a wide spread. You can upgrade your shots up to five times to increase your firepower. There’s also a magic system that allows you to pick up offensive or defensive spells to use until your magic meter depletes. By far the most useful of these is called Wildfire, which transforms your pellets into big blue bubbles that demolish many enemies quite quickly. But you can also get lightning bolts, ground attacks, shields and homing arrows, among other things.

But what really makes Wings of Wor so memorable is just how gross and weird and relentless it is. It’s not a game for people who like to relax while they’re playing shooters – it’s the sort of game that will appeal to those who enjoy being on the edge of their seats and don’t mind being overstimulated by all the onscreen action. It’s a tough game, but there are cheat codes available to make it easier, allow you to select levels or to give you unlimited continues.

Fortunately, Wings of Wor is not trapped on its original console; you can find the game for purchase on modern console platforms under its Japanese name, Gynoug. The English is all intact so the game if functionally identical to the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive release. Otherwise, it’s fairly easy to find and play on your favorite emulator.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

RELEASE DATE: 1991

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Data East

BEST VERSIONS: Arcade

It’s hard to classify a game like Rohga Armor Force because it’s both a scrolling shoot ‘em up and also a run and gun game combined into one. But mechanically, it plays more like Data East’s shoot ‘em up Boogie Wings than a 1990s console-style run and gun game like Cybernator, and it’s also part of a series that includes the shoot ‘em ups Skull Fang and Vapor Trail. But unlike the other games in the series, Rohga: Armor Force is all about playing your own way; if you’re a fan of the highly customizable Konami shooters like Gradius III, you’ll love the opening screen of this game because it allows you to pick and choose three sets of parts for your mechanical suit, resulting in 64 different loadouts available that are in some cases substantially different from one another.

The loadouts include three basic choices: which form of mobility you’d like, which missile-style weapon you’d like and while close-up weapon you’d like. In addition to this, the game starts you off with a spreadshot Vulcan cannon but allows you to pick up three other types of guns including a cluster shot that fires waves of green circles that gradually spread out, a grenade gun that launches a powerful explosive or a laser gun that shoots an awesome-looking beam. And even that’s not the end of it; you can also pick up little jetpack-equipped troops who cling to your mech’s body and shoot in the directions you can’t. Two of the chassis can only hold two troops, but two others can hold four at a time.

A fully powered battle suit can do a lot of damage, and it can also take up to eight hits before the pilot desperately ejects and flies around with a jetpack of his own. He can only take one shot before he’s down for the count, but he’s surprisingly nimble and can also collect the spare troops to circle around him like options. Even better, the pilot keeps whatever gun his mechanical suit was using.

All of those options would be overwhelming in a lesser arcade game, but Rohga: Armor Force keeps things fun by keeping the action moving and the level designs varied. While the first stage gives you the chance to get the hang of the controls in a static stage aboard a carrier plane, most levels scroll the action from left to right, forcing you to keep moving and to even move up or down along terrain that’s somewhat like the ground you’d see in a beat ‘em up that’s sloped into the background like ramps or hills. This adds some interesting three-dimensional aspects to the gameplay and allows for some fun transitions between what are essentially lanes of combat.

And it’s good that things move fast, because Rohga: Armor Force is surprisingly long for an arcade game – it takes a full hour to get through its 12 missions, and the last one is a bear because you have to take down the enemy Mother Ship Lagnalok-2 before a giant mecha suit named Goliath pops out and tries to avenge the loss of its command ship. The game does a really good job of communicating the story through text boxes that pop up with portraits of anime-style characters, and your ally Raven 3 will often pop up and tell you where to find a boss’s weak spot or what to expect in the level ahead.

Those who enjoy mecha and fast-paced combat will find a lot to love about Rohga Armor Force, but one of its best features is its 2-player co-op, which allows two people to pick drastically different loadouts and complement one another. Continues allow you to keep going from where your ejected pilot died, and the game does little to set you back once you start a new life.

The only sad thing about Rohga: Armor Force is how hard it is to find today. It was only ever available in Japan (though it’s fully translated into English) and only received home ports there for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn in Japanese. Today, it’s pretty much only playable with a ROM and arcade emulator. Oddly enough, both its sequel Skull Fang and predecessor Vapor Trail were released in arcades in North America, and Vapor Trail even made it to the Sega Genesis. They’re both fine, but both are top-down vertical shooters and nowhere near as fun or polished as Rohga: Armor Force is.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

We’re going to talk about console and handheld adventure games from the 1980s, 90s and 2000s including a deeper look at a few great titles and an overview of how the genre was shaped by the Japanese adventure game scene!

I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed!

In 1980, Atari released a game for its Virtual Console System, later known as the Atari 2600, called Adventure. The game was originally intended to be a graphical adaptation of the mainframe Adventure that took place in the Colossal Cave by Will Crowther and Don Woods, but designer Warren Robinett ran into a few problems as he was designing the game.

First of all, the console system didn’t have anywhere near the memory that a mainframe computer had, which meant that the game needed to be designed using some very clever techniques designed to maximize the limited available space.

Second, the game’s graphical output was very limited in terms of how it displayed environments, items, characters and enemies.

And finally, the game had to be designed to work with a single-button joystick rather than a keyboard that could accept more sophisticated text input.

Robinett worked on the game for a year while a disbelieving management team tried to discourage him from continuing the project. It went on to be a million-seller for Atari, providing a surprisingly sophisticated fantasy gaming experience for the era and allowing players to explore a thirty-room kingdom, locate items within castles and battle dragons.

Oh, and get pestered by a very annoying bat.

It was a groundbreaking game in 1980, but today, Adventure is more famous for something else – being the first game to contain an “Easter Egg” due to a secret room Robinett hid in the game with a simple credit of himself as the game’s author. The reason he had to hide it at all was because Atari’s President, Ray Kassar, believed programmers were prima donnas and he didn’t want them to receive public credit for their work, both because they were not paid well and because it would make it easier for competitors to poach them. But the hidden room made it in to the final build, and Atari didn’t even know it existed until players started writing in inquiring about it.

According to Steve Wright, who was the manager of the Atari Home video game department at the time, Atari’s management wanted to remove the code for future printings of the game, but he persuaded them that not only would it cost too much to do so, but that gamers would love finding “Easter eggs” like this in their games. It was a metaphor that stuck, and Wright started insisting that every game include something like this, leading to several games at least including the developers’ initials. Adventure is now famous not just for being one of the great Atari 2600 games, but also for establishing the idea of a game developer receiving credit in a home console game.

But by the time the game had shipped, Warren Robinett had moved on to co-found The Learning Company, and the basic ideas and mechanics he’d developed for Adventure went on to shape some of their graphical edutainment computer games including Rocky’s Boots, Think Quick! and the surprisingly sophisticated programming adventure Robot Odyssey. His ideas also shaped a few Atari 2600 games like the Swordquest series and Haunted House, and also 1979’s Superman, which shipped before Adventure and which was built by John Dunn using some of Robinett’s ideas.

But in the wake of the 1983 market crash and the death of the second-generation consoles, adventure gaming on console games transitioned away from Robinett’s style and largely began either adapting the Japanese style popularized by Yuji Horii’s 1983 game The Portopia Serial Murder Case, the Filmation style popularized by Ultimate Play the Game’s 1983 isometric adventure Knight Lore or the point and click style of computer adventure games like Uninvited, Shadowgate and Déjà Vu as well as Maniac Mansion and King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!, all of which, by the way, got actual ports to the NES.

So did Princess Tomato and the Salad Kingdom, a Hudson Soft adventure originally released for home computers in Japan, and also a remake of a 1986 Nihon Falcom computer adventure role-playing game called Taiyo no Shinden: Asteka II that was localized for the NES in North America as 1988’s Tombs & Treasure.

But the NES also got a few original adventure games of its own. One of these is Beam Software’s Nightshade, a 1992 release that’s an honest to goodness point and click adventure with some light combat. Like a lot of adventure games, it’s lighthearted, and the premise is that Metro City’s superhero has been dispatched and a supervillain named Sutekh unites all the criminal gangs under his banner. A trenchcoat and trilby hat-wearing vigilante in sunglasses named Mark who prefers to go by the name Nightshade (but is sometimes called “Lampshade” or “Nightcart” by the denizens of Metro City) decides to take on Sutekh and the four criminal gangs under his control, but he has to solve a number of puzzles to do so. It’s a fascinating game that definitely has become a cult classic over time, but which was almost entirely ignored when it first debuted. Today, it’s far easier to play since you can use save states; the original game had to be completed in a single sitting.

The 1989 NES game Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is also an adventure game, though not a very good one. As Eddie Valiant and Roger Rabbit, you search around Hollywood, Toontown and the surrounding areas for pieces of Marvin Acme’s will. You also have to talk to characters you run into on the street or in buildings and search for items and joke punchlines, the latter of which Roger uses to get out of trouble when Judge Doom’s weasels catch up with him. The game looks great – it was made by Rare for publisher LJN Toys, and it honestly has a lot of good ideas in it, but as an adventure game, it’s boring and repetitive and doesn’t make enough use of the movie’s incredible ideas.

I also consider David Crane’s 1989 NES game A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia an adventure game because it involves exploring a Pitfall II-style world and making use of your blob pal Blobert, who can transform into different things when you feed him various flavors of jellybeans. There’s a puzzle solving aspect to this because you have to deduce the right transformations needed to overcome different challenges that you face and also do a little bit of lateral thinking to understand how the jellybean flavors correspond to Blobert’s powers. The punch jellybean, for example, turns Blobert into a hole because it plays into the phrase “hole punch.” The ketchup-flavored jellybean will make Blobert catch up with you. And the Licorice jellybean turns Blobert into a ladder because… um, they both start with L?

Codemasters also released a 1992 game for its Aladdin modular cartridge system on the NES called Linus Spacehead’s Cosmic Crusade, and while it’s a point and click adventure and platformer hybrid, I can’t recommend it as more than a curiosity.

Beyond all of these, a couple of action games infused the Japanese menu-driven style of adventure gaming in some interesting ways. One of those games is Dr. Chaos, which is part Castlevania-style platformer in a haunted house and which turns into a point and click first-person adventure game when you enter rooms. And on the Sega Master System, there’s Spellcaster, a localized port of a game based on the Peacock King manga that starts out as an action sidescroller set in Japanese mythology but turns into a first-person adventure game halfway through.

You might get the sense that adventure games just weren’t very popular on console systems, and you’d be right. What’s far more common are action adventure titles like The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, The Battle of Olympus, Faxanadu or Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest where players have to explore large worlds, collect items or powers and overcome obstacles to progress, with a lighter emphasis on puzzle-solving.

And yet on the Sega Genesis, players did get Scooby-Doo Mystery, an honest-to-goodness Day of the Tentacle-style adventure game starring the Scooby gang. This game debuted in 1995 and was developed by Illusions Gaming Company and it’s honestly really good if you enjoy adventure games. It even breaks up the gameplay into two episodes, and in both of them, Fred, Daphne and Velma get trapped and need help from Scooby and Shaggy. The first is called ‘Blake’s Hotel’ and features a guy in a monster suit who’s terrorizing everyone to scare them out of the hotel, who chases you through hallway doorways and who’s revealed to be exactly who you thought it was once he’s captured. The second is called ‘Ha Ha Carnival’ and it involves a phantom clown who’s scaring everyone on a boardwalk and sabotaging some of the rides. Once again, he’s stopped because of those meddling kids.

I’m not even a big Scooby Doo fan and I had a blast with this game. Give it a try!

Another interesting point and click adventure for both the SNES and the Sega Genesis is the 1994 release Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, though the twist is that you don’t control Pac-Man directly, but instead guide him as he wanders around Pac-Land and shoot at things that might affect him with a slingshot. It’s a very odd concept for a Pac-Man game and its unusual control scheme takes some getting used to. The game’s broken up into four missions with a couple of intermissions to play some classic Pac-Man, but the gameplay and art style more closely resembles the 1984 Pac-Land platform game that adopted a lot of the Hanna Barbera cartoon aesthetics.

Both Scooby Doo and Pac-Man 2 illustrate a trend for many console adventure games going forward – they were games largely made for kids based on popular characters or intellectual properties. There are games like the 1996 adaptation of the movie Casper on the PlayStation, Saturn, 3DO and Game Boy Color, which is an isometric adventure game with heavy puzzle elements. There’s the game Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster and the Beanstalk, originally released in 1996 for Windows but better known for its 1998 PlayStation version, which features a mixture of platforming and point and click adventuring. And there are the Game Boy Color and Advance Hamtaro games such as 2001’s Ham-Hams Unite! and 2002’s Ham-Ham Heartbreak featuring cute hamsters who have to learn “Ham-chat” words that also serve as an expanding dictionary of actions Hamtaro can take within the game. There’s the 2001 platformer adventure on the Game Boy Color, SpongeBob Squarepants: Legend of the Lost Spatula, and there’s also the 2006 direct to video movie tie-in The Barbie Diaries: High School Mystery.

But I also want to mention Blazing Dragons, a 1996 adventure game on the Saturn and PlayStation made by The Illusions Gaming Company, the same developer that made The Scooby Doo Mystery. While this is a licensed game as well – it’s based on a Canadian cartoon show by Nelvana created by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame along with Gavin Scott – the lack of familiarity most gamers will probably have with the property is an asset towards enjoying the game, because it’s very much in the vein of Discworld, but with dragons!

The premise of the show is a sort of twisted take on Arthurian legends where dragons in the castle of Camelhot sit around the Square Table under the guidance of King Allfire, who holds the legendary sword Exaliburn. The show and the game center on Squire Flicker, who serves under Sir Loungelot, a lazy but favored knight who constantly forces Squire Flicker to complete tasks for him that he can take credit for.

Obviously, the show has a lot of terrible puns, but the writing’s a lot more clever than you might assume, and the voice acting is top-notch, featuring the voices of Terry Jones, Cheech Marin and Harry Shearer, who’s not only famous for being a member of the fictional band Spinal Tap but also one of the main voice actors on The Simpsons.

The game itself could have been a lazy FMV adaptation, but nope – this is a true icon-driven point and click adventure game with pixel art characters, painted backgrounds, inventory puzzles, dialogue trees and even the odd arcade sequence. Even more surprising, this game is truly fun – it has a complete story to tell, doesn’t require any familiarity with the source material and it’s amazingly well-crafted all around. I think if it’d been released on Windows as well it might have made a slightly bigger impression, and it’s every bit as good as the Sierra and LucasArts adventures of the era.

But console adventure games that didn’t fit into the licensed adaptation mold tended to fit into some of the styles more popular in Japan – anime and manga-style games, visual novels and dating sims and mysteries.

And, of course, games designed to provide a spine-tingling sense of horror.

In 1981, Atari released James Andreasen’s Haunted House, an adventure game in the style of Adventure that replaced that game’s blocky avatar with a pair of eyes wandering around a dark four-story mansion filled with rooms populated by ghosts, spiders and bats. The game was well-known for the rather frightening sense of atmosphere provided by its spooky sound effects, flashing lightning and, in the harder game modes, persistent darkness. Suffice it to say that few 8-bit adventure games managed to be anywhere near as tense or scary as Haunted House was, and it’s still a bit nerve-wracking today. On home consoles, however, few games bothered to deliver the horror vibes that Haunted House was able to pull off.

But in Japan, horror adventure games became popular on home computers thanks to developers like System Sacom, which produced the Novel Ware line of games, the adult game developer Fairytale’s Dead of the Brain series and Soft Studio Wing, the creators of Mirrors and Onryō Senki, the latter of which even includes a protective ofuda design on the box to ward off evil spirits.

But as far as consoles go, one of the most notable horror adventure games of the 1990s was the Mega CD game Yumemi Yakata no Monogatari, which came out in 1993 in Japan from System Sacom and SEGA. Vik Tokai published a North American port in 1994 for the Sega CD under the name Mansion of Hidden Souls, offering players a spooky Myst or 7^th Guest-style mansion exploration with pre-rendered full-motion video sequences transitioning between screens. The hidden souls the title refers to are butterflies representing other souls who’ve gotten trapped in the mansion and who sometimes help you along the way as you attempt to rescue your sister.

The 1994 sequel, which was this time published by Sega as a launch title for the Saturn console, is confusingly called The Mansion of Hidden Souls but has you take on the role of June, one of the butterflies in the mansion who’s tasked with trying to figure out why the moon has gone blood red, which is weakening the mansion’s power. Most of the game is spent talking to the other inhabitants of the mansion, and it’s honestly a very weird sequel because it sort of continues the story without preserving the horror vibes of the original. It’s also notorious for bad voice acting and uncanny valley-style floating heads.

If you’re going to play any of System Sacom’s games, the one to try is Lunacy, a 1996 Saturn game published by Atlus. It’s similar in style, but a bit better than either of its predecessors and the chief complaint about it is that the first half is something of a walking simulator – sure, you can wander around, but the game tends to guide you to where you need to go and there’s not much to interact with besides watching the story play out. This time, you play as an amnesiac named Fred who’s arrived in a place called Misty Town and who’s trying to find the City of Moons so he can escape a death sentence. The second half of the game is where all your choice and agency as a player finally arrive and allow you to complete actions that impact the game’s ending. Unfortunately, the game’s a bit clunky as adventures go and you’ll probably need a walkthrough to know how to obtain the ending you want. There’s also very little reason to play The Mansion of Hidden Souls before it – there’s no important storyline connection, just more of a thematic one.

One other adventure horror series I want to mention is the loosely-connected trilogy from Kenji Enjo’s studio, Warp. I’ll mention first that Kenji Eno was known for being one of those unhinged, boundary-pushing game creators in the mold of Suda51 or Swery65, and if you ever read The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers or any of the interviews with the man, you’ll see just how wild he was. He was also a provocateur of the highest order, perhaps because he also had a background as a musician and knew how to play the press for attention. One of his most famous stunts was in 1996 when he was showing off one of his games to the Japanese press and had it start out with a PlayStation logo that morphed into a Saturn logo so he could announce that he was going Saturn-exclusive. It was horribly offensive to Sony, especially since it was their press event.

The three games for which Warp and Kenji Eno are best known are the loosely-related D, D2 and Enemy Zero, all of which share some common ideas but are entirely different games with no continuity between them. One of the oddest conceits is that each game stars the same heroine, Laura, but she always has a different last name and is treated like an actress starring in standalone stories.

The original D was first released for the 3DO and, surprisingly, was the game that sold the best of the three, perhaps because it was also ported to the PlayStation, Saturn and PC afterwards. It’s an absolutely bizarre game where Laura Harris is sent into a hospital where her father, Richard, has barricaded himself and reportedly killed a bunch of people inside. She’s supposed to get him to surrender. But as she steps foot in the hospital and sees a bunch of corpses on the ground, she winds up in a medieval castle in an alternate dimension and has to explore it, 7^th Guest-style, while she uncovers the mystery of what her father has been up to. The uncanny valley-style plastic human characters aren’t too engaging, but the game does have a few shocking moments worth seeing. And yes, a lot of the game’s weirdest moments have to do with cannibalism.

But rather than describe it, let me just encourage you to check it out for yourself, because the plot leads to a pretty bizarre connection to a famous monster whose name also begins with D. Or you can just watch a playthrough, because even though this game was released on multiple discs, all that FMV means it’s a relatively short experience you’ll finish in a couple of hours.

D-2 was supposed to be the killer app for Panasonic’s ill-fated M2 console, which was being designed to replace the 3DO. The original version was supposed to be a sequel featuring Laura’s son and featuring a different D as a villain – this time the Devil himself! But that game never got finished, and what we instead received was a Dreamcast follow-up featuring Laura Parton, a plane crash survivor who winds up in the Canadian wilderness where she and her fellow survivors discover others have blossomed into hostile mutants with plant-like tendrils. There are also evil angels to contend with. The story at first sort of seems like it’s inspired by The Thing, but it’s way crazier and turns into a survival horror shooter as it goes, complete with a leveling system to give Laura more health as she kills more monsters. The ultimate story is sort of an Eldritch horror sort of conflict with evil aliens who want to annihilate mankind, but who are thwarted by Laura and her connection to the Earth Mother. It takes a lot of cues from the style of Metal Gear Solid, complete with lengthy cutscenes.

This game is sprawled across 4 CDs and is significantly longer than the original D. Also, the end credits sequence ends with a bunch of stock footage of Earth’s history and many alarming statistics about how overpopulated the world is about to get and how crummy things are for us and everyone else here, which, again, if you’ve finished Metal Gear Solid, seems like D-2 took some pretty direct inspiration from Hideo Kojima but went a different way with it.

Warp’s other famous game is Enemy Zero, in which Laura Lewis is trapped on a space station with invisible aliens that are killing everyone. The game is also divided between FMV sequences and 3D exploration sequences with some first person shooting, in which Laura has to locate the aliens with an audio device that tells her when they’re in range of her gun sights. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t produce stereo sound so it doesn’t quite work as an auditory 3D signal. That’s a shame, because it’s a neat idea.

The game’s definitely inspired by the film Alien, but it’s got its own wrinkles, and while I don’t want to ruin the story, I would definitely encourage you to go in with your eyes open that this game is hard. One hit and you’re dead, forcing you back to the main menu to reload. Fortunately, there are checkpoints where you can save, but unfortunately, they are limited due to the use of a mechanic where saved games are stored on an audio recorder where a save takes 3 charges and loads deplete one. You only have 64, which means you can run out. Enemy Zero’s reputation for being one of the Saturn’s obnoxiously difficult games is well-earned. I would recommend the 1998 Windows version, however – it looks and plays better.

Much like the actor character of Laura, some of the cast of Enemy Zero show up in D-2 in different roles. Again, this is a really interesting idea, and it helps make some of the weirder stuff between the three games feel like it’s connected in a broader way, even though none of it is. These games are all very interesting, but I wouldn’t say any has aged particularly well, and the main reason you’d want to play any of them today is for the absolutely bonkers storytelling.

Another horror-themed adventure game was Human Entertainment’s 1995 Super Famicom game Clock Tower, which was inspired by the 1985 Italian film Phenomena, better known as Creepers in the US and UK, though this version is about 20 minutes shorter than the original. In the movie, which stars Jennifer Connelly as Jennifer Covino, an American girl attends a Swiss boarding school and has to track down a serial murderer who’s killing other girls at the school. Oh, and Jennifer has a telepathic link to insects for some reason, and makes friends with a chimpanzee named Inga. It’s a weird movie.

But Clock Tower takes some of its ideas and adapts them into a maddeningly tough survival horror game about an orphan named Jennifer Simpson who’s taken in, along with other orphaned girls, to live in castle-like mansion called the Clock Tower owned by the Barrows family. Jennifer soon finds one of her fellow orphans murdered and is chased by a terrifying and heavily deformed boy with a huge pair of shears – the Scissorman. Jennifer has to find a way to escape him, but winds up uncovering a deeper plot involving his mother, his brother and a devil-worshipping cult. It’s a 2D point and click adventure game with pixel art-style graphics, but also quite tense and timing-oriented and really difficult to solve without a lot of trial and error.

Clock Tower was recently remade by WayForward in 2024’s Clock Tower: Rewind, and it looks and feels like the original but now has animated cutscenes, voice acting and some amazing new songs by Dale North that feature vocals from the Silent Hill series’s Mary Elizabeth McGlynn and NieR series’s Emi Evans. It’s a great way to play the game.

Of course, outside of Japan, the game that most people would know as Clock Tower is actually the 1996 sequel, which was released on the PlayStation. This game involves the Scissorman hunting down Jennifer and her new adoptive mother Helen, and the two have to find an artifact called the Demon Idol, return to the Clock Tower and open a portal to Hell to destroy Scissorman for good. Though the game is in 3D, it retains the same basic point and click control scheme as the Super Famicom game and feels quite different from Resident Evil, which debuted the same year.

The Clock Tower series got two more games – one in 1998 called Clock Tower: Ghost Head but released in the West as Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within and a 2002 PlayStation 2 game called Clock Tower 3, which eschews the point and click style for direct control over your character. Neither game is connected in story or even has you visit the Clock Tower mansion – the premise becomes more of a theme about school girls running away from terrifying killers and monsters. And unfortunately, the series has stayed dormant ever since.

One other horror adventure from the PlayStation is FromSoftware’s 1998 title Echo Night, a first person game aboard a haunted ship that has you solve puzzles and help spirits solve their personal problems and atone for their regrets. It’s a fairly short and rough-around-the-edges adventure I can’t really recommend to anyone but the curious. There are two sequels – one only released in Japan and a PlayStation 2 sequel from 2004 called Echo Night: Beyond – as well as a spiritual successor from 2018 for VR called Déraciné.

Speaking of which, there are also many other 1990s horror adventure games from Japan that have never made it into North America, and I can’t even pretend to be an expert in them because I don’t speak or read Japanese. I come across them occasionally, like the 1999 SNK game Athena: Awakening from the Ordinary Life that stars Psycho Soldier’s Athena Asamiya. If you want to dive into those sorts of games, you’ll need to learn Japanese, but you’ll find plenty to play.

Recently, a rather intriguingly named digital game called Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening shipped on Windows and modern consoles. It’s developed by Magic Pockets and published by Microids and based on a 1970s and 80s manga and anime series by Buichi Terasawa featuring the psychogun-armed, blonde-haired adventurer Cobra, who battles space pirates led by Lord Salamander and duels with Crystal Boy or Bowie – it depends on the translation – who’s a man made out of incredibly strong glass. Cobra has an assistant named Lady Armaroid and a complicated relationship with triplets with the last name of Royal who each have parts of a treasure map tattooed on their backs.

It’s a fun story; total 80s cheese with a Total Recall or Bourne Identity framing device thrown in for good measure. And it’s also pretty mature in its themes and attitudes towards sex and nudity, which might explain why it was very popular in France despite being only a minor hit in Japan. So it’s surprising to see a modern retro-style action game based on it given that it’s not really trying to make a comeback as a property and it’s not exactly a nostalgic anime series for anyone else in the world.

But it’s even more surprising that this isn’t the first time a Cobra game has been released with some connection to France. Loricels made two of them for home computers in the 1980s, simply titled Cobra and Cobra 2. And there was also a Mega CD game called The Space Adventure released in 1995 by Virgin interactive Entertainment’s European division.

But The Space Adventure was actually created by Hudson Soft as a 1991 PC Engine sequel to the 1989 PC Engine CD game Cobra: Kokuryū Ō no Densetsu, and while both North America and Europe got the sequel on Sega’s CD-ROM console, the original game, which tells the first part of Cobra’s story, was never released.

That’s a shame, because The Space Adventure is a decent game in its own right. It’s also the first game to ever receive an ESRB rating of M due to the extreme violence, skimpy outfits and outright nudity present in the game. But more than anything, it’s a typical example of the Japanese style of adventure game we’ve already discussed when I mentioned Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher a few episodes back – a menu driven experience depicted by selecting actions accompanied by still or slightly animated images with occasional moments of controlling your character. In Cobra’s case, that’s on his spaceship, or in certain corridors, where you get to walk up and down paths and move between rooms in third person perspective.

The game’s story more or less follows the manga and the anime adaptation, leading to a climactic battle with Crystal Boy. There are many twists and turns that get you there, including quite a few moments of ultra-violence and one midgame encounter with an ancient giant robot. Cobra’s almost always up for a fight with a grin on his face and a cigar hanging out of his mouth, and when he is in trouble, he can count on Lady to come and rescues him as the plot requires it. Everything looks cool and there are even sections with some voice acting. I’m not sure why critics panned this game so much in the 1990s – it’s a decent experience today, and surprisingly lengthy for a console adventure, clocking in around 10-15 hours the first time around.

Another outer space adventure game from Japan that many English-speaking gamers would like to see get an official release is Hideo Kojima’s Policenauts, which came out in 1994 on the NEC PC-98 before getting ported to the 3DO, PlayStation and Saturn in the following years. Unlike Snatcher, which draws so heavily from Blade Runner that it might as well be called a manga-style adaptation, Policenauts feels more like its own thing – sort of a buddy cop in space story, sort of a hard science fiction meditation on the problems with space colonization and organ trafficking, sort of a procedural murder mystery. Sure, it draws from many influences – especially Lethal Weapon – but it feels more original.

As a game, it’s primarily a visual novel style of adventure in the style of J.B. Harold Murder Club where you exhaust every available menu option to proceed and, like Snatcher, there are shooting sequences. The story has a few twists and turns and even two different prologues, but it’s an entertaining and surprisingly straightforward ride that takes about 10 hours to get through.

The biggest problem with Policenauts is that it’s never officially been translated into English, which meant that some of the slyer references made to the game in Metal Gear Solid went right over players’ heads. For example, Meryl Silverburgh is a main character in Policenauts, FOXHOUD tattoo and all, and the protagonist from Policenauts, Jonathan Ingraham, smokes the same brand of secondary smoke-less cigarettes as Solid Snake. And Snake’s real name – David – is an allusion to Meryl’s partner, Dave Forrest, in Policenauts, though it’s a bit tongue in cheek, since Dave’s a pacifist who shoots to wound and Snake is constantly telling Meryl to shoot to kill.

Thankfully, a massive fan translation effort resulted in the PlayStation version of the game receiving a high-quality English translation in 2009, and if you want to play it, the good news is that it’s not hard to do so provided you can get your hands on the original discs or an image of them. I’d say the mystique of Policenauts is probably a bit stronger than the game itself, but it’s still well worth playing.

Another PlayStation-era adventure game long stuck in Japan has been Moon: Remix RPG Adventure, a 1997 release by Love-de-Lic that only recently got a full worldwide release in English and other languages. Now, I’m going to be honest and say I that I have not played this game all the way through myself, and with good reason – it’s only been available in English the last few years and my focus has been on games from the 80s and early 90s during my research project, The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played. I’ll get to Moon one of these days. But I’ve played the first few hours, I’ve watched some playthroughs to get what it’s about, and let me tell you - it’s a brilliant game I’ll be excited to spend more time playing when it’s time.

The premise of the game is that you begin as a hero in the style of Dragon Quest and make your way to the final boss, a dragon. But before you finish the battle, the game pulls back to reveal a boy playing a video game on his TV, and his mom orders him to stop playing and go to bed. Before he can, he’s mysteriously absorbed into the TV and falls into the world of the game, landing next to the towspeople of the castle in the Moon world where the Hero resides in a land called Love-de-Gard. The boy is a spirit who can’t be seen but who can be understood, so he puts on a few spare clothes an old lady gives him – she mistakes him for her grandchild – and walks around town in a green stocking cap, a pair of gloves, a pair of boots and a vest, which is all anyone can see of him. He’s also contacted by a benevolent Queen who tells him to get to know the townspeople and help them with their problems.

This sets up the first part of the game, which is basically built around the conceit of, “what does the rest of the game world do when a JRPG hero isn’t around?” And honestly, it’s kind of a miserable place because the hero is so obsessed with leveling up that he’s abusing the world around him, particularly the monsters, who are really just animals and whose corpses are strewn about the woods and whose spirits need to be reunited with their bodies so they can be taken to the moon and resurrected. He’s also stealing from people, bothering them with inane questions and murdering their pets in a misguided effort to save the villagers from animals that look dangerous. Every opportunity to help a person or a creature is essentially a puzzle to be solved, and as you do, you earn love, which in turn helps you to level up your love level and gain more actions so you can travel further in the world.

It’s a wonderfully subversive adventure game that looks and plays like an RPG but which has no combat and forces you to do good by helping people instead of battling your way to glory. The characters and game world are absolutely captivating, the game’s look is distinctive and the soundtrack is amazing. I particularly adore the game’s fusion of traditional art, pre-rendered art and Claymation, and nothing in this game, even the design of the hero, looks like any other RPG or adventure game you’ve played before. The story’s also really funny and interesting and has a lot of heart, as you might expect.

Fans of Toby Fox’s Undertale and Deltarune will definitely see a lot of thematic similarities between those games and Moon, and the game’s artwork reminds me a lot of the TV World in Chapter 3 of Deltarune since Tenna very closely resembles the look of characters from Moon. While it wasn’t a direct inspiration, Fox has said in interviews that just hearing about Moon while he was working on Undertale helped shape his own concept. But I’d suggest the pacifist route in Undertale and the complex character interactions of Deltarune are very much in the vein of what Moon pulled off back in the late 1990s. If you enjoy those games, you’ll love this one too!

Love-de-Lic made some other unusual games like the 1999 adventure puzzler UFO: A Day in the Life and the 2000 evolutionary strategy game LOL: Lack of Love, both of which were only released in Japan. When Love-de-Lic folded, some of the staff went on to form Punchline, which created the very odd 2002 PlayStation 2 kissing game Chulip and the interesting 2006 psychological horror game Rule of Rose. Some of the staff later formed a new developer called Onion Games to release 2016’s Dandy Dungeon: Legend of Brave Yamada, the global port of Moon and a 2024 Moon sequel called Stray Children.

Well, I’ve done it to myself again – I had a whole other section on Japanese visual novels to talk about and I realized that this episode was getting far too long. And so I’m going to file those away for next week so we can go into a lot more detail and instead talk about a few other console and handheld adventure games worth mentioning.

Let’s begin with the 1997 PlayStation and Saturn game Swagman, which was created by Core Design and which honestly defies easy description. It’s an action-adventure game sort of in the style of The Legend of Zelda depicted from a top-down view, and it superficially looks a bit like Zombies Ate My Neighbors, but with pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds.

But this is an adventure game through and through about a brother and sister who are on vacation in a place called Paradise Falls where a sinister being called Swagman is unleashing monsters and trapping the adults in perpetual nightmares as he rounds up the Dreamfly fairies. You begin the game as Zack and have to rescue your sister, Hannah, who’s captured in the opening cinematic by Swagman’s goblin-like Skallywag minions. Eventually, both of you have to venture into the nightmare realm known as the Terrortries to rescue the fairies who make up a group called the Dreamflight so they can spread enough Dreamdrew to counteract Swagman’s nightmare-inducing Dream-Ash. Oh, and Zack and Hannah’s hit points are measures in Zees, and if they lose them all, the dream is over and they, too, are consumed by nightmares.

I realize this all sounds like the fever dream of a person who’s spent too much time imbibing in some odd substances of their own, but Swagman is actually a really neat game. Though it is an action title with boss battles and a Zelda-style emphasis on exploration, rescuing fairies, collecting keys, blowing holes in walls and progressing into new areas, you also pick up items that extend your abilities and often have to think a bit to solve the game’s surprisingly involved puzzles. Zack and Hannah also can transform into monsters when they enter a mirror and step into the Dream World.

While Swagman didn’t earn super great review scores when it was released, it’s actually well worth your time to play today, particularly on the Sega Saturn.

As for more traditional adventure games, Capcom produced a pretty neat one in 2001 for the Game Boy Advance called Gyakuten Saiban, which means “Turnabout Trial.” In this game, a rookie lawyer named Ryuuichi Naruhodou has to successfully argue cases in court, including two against an aggressive opponent named Reiji Mitsurugi, who’s never lost and who gets angrier and more cunning in defeat until he himself winds up a murder suspect. The game was popular enough to warrant two Game Boy Advance sequels, but Capcom’s American division started pushing for a localization as well. The resulting game was christened Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and it debuted on the Nintendo DS in 2005 to low expectations.

Obviously, it caught on, because the series, which is now simply called Ace Attorney, is still going strong. But for many American gamers, myself included, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was the game to expose players to the modern style of Japanese visual novels and detective games. In each chapter of the first release, players are charged with investigating a crime, gathering clues, preparing a defense and then getting into the thick of things in the courtroom, where the prosecutors will introduce arguments that need to be interrupted and refuted with hard evidence. The tennis-like rhythm of things going your way and then suddenly going the wrong way as a new argument is introduced makes these games tense and fun, and the wacky characters, strange contrivances, ridiculously permissive judge and the fact that at one point you have to put a parrot on the stand make this game incredibly memorable.

The Nintendo DS version also allowed players to shout “Objection!,” “Hold it!” or “Take that!” into the microphone and also to play a brand new fifth chapter prosecuted by Phoenix Wright’s rival Miles Edgeworth with some added touchscreen elements. While both of the other Game Boy Advance games were also localized for North America and Europe and ported for the Nintendo DS, they didn’t receive any other features. Fortunately, every sequel since has been released worldwide in some form.

And this includes the 2012 crossover game Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, co-developed by Capcom and Level-5, the studio behind the Professor Layton games.

We might as well talk about Professor Layton as well, because each of the games in his series is an adventure game with traditional puzzles to solve like brain teasers and logic puzzles and even manipulation puzzles like sliders or a jigsaw puzzle. The first game, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, was released in 2007 in Japan for the Nintendo DS and a year later in North America. Unlike a lot of DS games of the era, the Professor Layton games feature animated cutscenes and occasional voice acting,

The setup of the games tends to be the same from entry to entry – Professor Hershel Layton is dressed like Arense Lupin and is part Indiana Jones, part Sherlock Holmes and, in the third game, part Doc Brown from Back to the Future, and he’s accompanied by his young assistant Luke Triton, the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’s Dr. Watson. The series was originally intended as a trilogy, but Level-5 had such success that it started creating prequels and side stories for subsequent entries, and a new sequel, Professor Layton and the New World of Steam, is due out sometime this year to finally continue the story.

As adventure games, the Professor Layton games are primarily little drips of story between arbitrary puzzles, with lots of talking head dialogue and accordion music in between. The beginning and the end of the game tend to be where most of the interesting storytelling takes place, and thus these games are less about the adventure than the destination. Even so, they’re fun and interesting and extremely well-made.

Another interesting adventure game from around the same time is the 2007 Capcom-developed game Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure, a truly remarkable title for the Wii that uses the game’s unique controller to facilitate a point and click adventure while also including some minigames that often involve shaking the Wiimote. Zack is a young pirate boy and Wiki is a monkey friend who can fly by spinning his tail. Along with their crew, The Sea Rabbits, Zack and Wiki are following the directions of the skull of Captain Barbaros to find an island of treasure… but of course they have an adversary, the Rose Rock gang led by the beautiful but annoying Captain Rose.

But the really treacherous character is of course Captain Barbaros, who betrays Zack and has a personal grudge against Wiki. The game’s story is primarily told through non-voiced dialogue, but since it’s in full 3D and has you point and click to move Zack around, it really does feel like a substantial adventure game. It feels more like One Piece than The Secret of Monkey Island, but it’s still quite fun.

I’m not sure why this game got overlooked as badly as it did – it’s really good and well-made, with great graphics, a fun story and wonderful characters. It also makes amazing use of the Wiimote by having you do things like build Rube Goldberg-type machines, play rhythm games, complete laser puzzles, go fishing and so much more.

One final game I wanted to mention this episode is Sega’s 2012 Nintendo 3DS title Rhythm Thief & the Emperor’s Treasure, a truly one of a kind fusion of adventure gaming, rhythm gaming and platforming that really deserves more attention. The story is absolutely bonkers and involves the resurrection of Napoleon in France in some vague era in the 20^th century, and you play as a boy named Raphael who’s leading a double life as the thief Phantom R. The adventure portion of the game involves running around Paris both during daylight and nighttime hours in visual novel style and occasionally dipping into minigames. The production values are amazing, and the music and character art add a lot of charm to the Parisian setting. Don’t miss this one – it’s truly an underrated gem.

If you’re paying close attention, you may notice I just mentioned the visual novel style of gameplay, which is a major subgenre of adventure gaming in Japan. So in our next episode, I’m going to give you a crash course in Japanese visual novels, murder mysteries, eroge and dating sims. Many of these games have never made it outside of Japan, but some of the ones that have, like Clannad and Steins;Gate, are considered some of the best narrative games ever made. Don’t miss it!

And now that we’ve brought console gaming and PC adventure gaming to a point where things are starting to converge in the 21^st century, our next episode after that will talk about how games like Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, which is also known as The Indigo Prophecy, Microids’s adventure games including Amerizone: The Explorer’s Legacy, the Syberia games, Post Mortem and Still Life and Index+’s really wild Dracula: Resurrection series all moved us forward. And we’re also going to talk about the rest of the Quantic Dream library and Daedalic Entertainment as well as a few of the other European series of note.

And then we’ll bring things to a near-conclusion by talking about the influence of Telltale Games and indie studios like Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games, Yahtzee Croshaw’s Fully Ramblomatic Games, Crystal Shard, AGD Interactive, Clifftop Games and Grundislav Games, as well as a few more!

And when that’s all said and done, we’ll close things out with some perspective on why adventure games are still relevant today and why they’ve seen such a resurgence over the last decade. And I’ll also set things up for us to begin a new series to talk about another genre that features progression-based storytelling, lots of variety and a long tradition of evolution in gaming – the platform game.

If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.

And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!

I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRY

Before I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.

This week, I’m recommending Decline’s Drops, a 2024 action platformer from, and I’m going to butcher this I’m sure, the French game developer Le Moulin aux Bulles

. It’s not a complicated game or even a particularly fresh take on the genre. You play as a puppet girl named Globule armed with boxing gloves, a dash mechanic, a double jump and a dodge roll, and you make your way through levels gathering dew drops and defeating the six heads of a hydra who wrecked your garden.

Gameplay-wise, it’s a lot like Donkey Kong Country Returns by way of Super Smash Bros., and that’s not a bad thing. The controls are tight, the animations are smooth and you have enough variety to your attacks to keep things interesting. There are puzzles to solve and collectibles to pick up, as well as some great boss encounters.

No, what makes this game stand out is the absolutely gorgeous hand-drawn artwork and a wonderful soundtrack. Decline’s Drops is a tremendously beautiful game that’s fun to play simply because it’s so much fun to watch and hear. Globule is an adorable animated character with hose-like arms and legs to give her a lot of motion, and her enemies are things like chickens and frogs and slugs rather than the same old sorts of bad guys. It’s not a super long platformer, either, requiring at most about 10 hours to finish.

It’s well worth the $15 it normally costs, but you can easily find it on sale if you look, and I myself found it in a bundle. Give it a shot! It’s a really enjoyable time.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

RELEASE DATE: 1993

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Irem

BEST VERSIONS: Arcade

In the Hunt is a submarine shoot ‘em up that bears a striking resemblance to Nazca Corporation’s 1996 run and gun classic Metal Slug, and that’s not an accident; many of the same team members made both games, and Irem’s loss as the company began to lose interest in video game development was SNK’s gain. We’ll cover the story of both entities a bit more when we cover Gun Force II in the run and gun section, but suffice it to say that if Gun Force II feels like a prequel to Metal Slug in all but name, In the Hunt feels like a gaiden-style offshoot that takes place underwater instead of aboveground.

That’s definitely evident in how the game plays; while Metal Slug can be a bit plodding, enemies still go down quickly and there’s a constant sense of forward progression. But In The Hunt is far slowly than most shoot ‘em ups, only scrolling the screen horizontally when the player moves forward and often requiring you to simultaneously concentrate on three different attack vectors – forward, upwards and downwards – as you maneuver your submarine around hazards, enemies and bullets. If it weren’t for the fact that the arcade version offers unlimited continues that put you right back into the action, it might even be considered challenging, but given the genre, it’s actually slightly below average in terms of its level of difficulty. About $5 worth of virtual quarters will get you through a single play, and you can also have a second player join in if you want to make things a little bit easier. The home ports on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn are a little more difficult, but they’re certainly beatable with some practice.

The basic setup for In the Hunt is that the world is still reeling from an apocalyptic war and an evil organization called D.A.S. is trying to launch what appears to be a super-powered ICBM from an underwater base. Your submarine, called the Granvia in some versions and the U.S. Crimson Fire in others, is sent in to stop it before what’s left of human civilization is destroyed. To do that, you have to travel through the D.A.S.’s heavily armed areas of control down to the Antarctic Circle and infiltrate the base there. One of the stranger things about the game is that the D.A.S. seems to be in league with some ancient underwater deity that you’ll have to fight along the way, but the game never really bothers to explain why the penultimate boss is a giant rock creature who’s been chained to the bottom of a volcanic cavern. Much like some of the stranger stuff in Metal Slug, you just kinda have to go along with it.

Your submarine is pretty capable with its default loadout, and from the start, you can fire torpedoes straight ahead, missiles upwards and depth charges downward, the latter two of which are controlled by a single button. One interesting facet of the upward attack is that it behaves differently under the water than it does if you surface – a standard missile becomes a homing missile if you’re above water and a floating bomb becomes a movable machine gun. The torpedoes can also be upgraded by three different levels of destructive ability, either firing straight in a destructive explosion, breaking into clusters like a shotgun or creating ripple trails. Unlike a lot of shoot ‘em ups that punish you for taking damage and make it difficult to climb back up to a reasonable level of power, In the Hunt’s special weapons are just icing on the cake that make your already formidable sub just a little bit more fun to use.

The game’s enemies are also interesting in how they move and interact with the world. Underwater ships move slowly and will turn around and come back, allowing you to let them pass by and come up underneath them and blast with your upwards rockets. There are also a lot of hazards to contend with underwater, some of which are easily destroyed, like mines, and some of which require you to carefully time your movements, like ice beams or ascending arrays of rockets. Above water, it’s a different scene – destroyer ships, VTOL choppers, fighter planes and other fast-moving or heavily-armored foes can really cause some misery if you don’t work to clear them out, and it’s only because the progression underwater is so leisurely in its pace that it’s even possible to keep an eye on the two different areas of the screen and ensure you aren’t overwhelmed by the enemies that appear.

In the Hunt is atypical for a shoot ‘em up in that it doesn’t throw a lot of enemies at you at one time. Enemies tend to be large and fairly capable of doing more than just following a predetermined pattern. There are places in the game where it makes a lot more sense to charge on ahead and scroll beyond the range the enemies have, but there are others where taking a moment to clear out everything you’re facing can keep pursuing foes from dogging you through tight corridors. The freedom the game gives you to control the pace of the action is a little surprising for a genre that’s known for being pretty linear, but the one place where it does seize the reins of controls is for the boss battles which are perfectly fine despite not being terribly inspired.

One boss is large and attacks with two tentacles. Another encounter has two bosses that move around in tandem and try to either trap you in their whirlpools or smash you. There’s an underwater, upside-down hydra-like dragon to contend with (which somehow is breathing actual flames of fire despite, you know, being deep under the ocean) and, as I mentioned before, a gigantic stone creature that chases you up a vertical shaft before you reach a point where you can begin dropping pieces of ceiling on his head. The final battle against the superweapon takes place in a tunnel where you’re moving fast and the rocket has to be vanquished piece by piece, but there’s little strategy to this beyond just surviving.

What makes In the Hunt truly special, though, is it graphics, which are finely detailed, bright and colorful and smoothly-animated and filled with fun ideas that keep the gameplay from growing stale. The first level is gorgeously rendered to give you a chilling sense of entering icy waters. On the second level, you’re required to not just navigate through a city, but blast your way through the weak spots of decrepit skyscrapers. There are all sorts of fun little details in this stage, including some cattle that get loose and run along with the action for a bit. The twin bosses who govern that stage don’t just battle you in a pool, but outside an abandoned stadium. On the next stage when you enter a volcanic cavern, the rocks radiate with color to give a sensation of pulsing heat. And when you reach the D.A.S. base where the superweapon is being held, the amount of detail put into the background is astounding, almost overshadowing the considerable action going on in the foreground.

Another interesting feature of the game is its four different endings, two of which are accessible from playing with a friend and two of which come from single player. Strangely, the best ending is the one most players will see – if you play single-player and continue at least once, you’re celebrated in a procession as you leave the D.A.S. territory and the freed people rush out to greet you, with some throwing themselves into the water in a lemming-like fashion. A more somber ending is played if you beat the game without continuing, which suggests someone at Irem either goofed up or thought nobody would bother to take the challenge. The multiplayer endings are also a little odd – you can battle for supremacy of the world in a timed battle or let the clock run out and both perish in a draw.

In the Hunt is best in its arcade incarnation, but it was ported reasonably well to the PlayStation and Windows and slightly less so for the Sega Saturn due to slowdown issues. I’ve noticed that the home versions seem to be a bit more generous in providing you with shields, but this is to offset the limited lives and continues provided. The PlayStation version also has an alternate soundtrack, which is definitely preferable to the arcade version’s grinding tunes. If you want to play the game today, the arcade version is available on the Blacknut service, on modern consoles through HAMSTER Corporation’s Arcade Archives series and is included in the Irem Arcade 1 Evercade Collection.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

RELEASE DATE: 1992

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Compile / Toho

BEST VERSIONS: SNES

The Super Nintendo doesn’t have as strong a reputation for high-quality exclusive shoot ‘em ups as the Genesis/Mega Drive or the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, but the one game it does have that towers above all others on the SNES is the generically-titled Space Megaforce, a vertically-scrolling shoot ‘em up better known in Japan and Europe by its proper name, Super Aleste.

And that distinction is actually a big deal, because this is the flagship series of Compile, one of the greatest shoot ‘em up developers that’s ever existed. While the Aleste series (pronounced “Arresta”) is largely synonymous with Sega’s consoles, the Super Nintendo’s lone foray into the series is an amazingly well-crafted experience that makes clever use of the hardware’s scaling sprites and rotations to do some things that are really distinct and different from other shoot ‘em ups. While tastes may vary a bit – I actually prefer M.U.S.H.A. and Robo Aleste myself – there’s no denying that Space Megaforce is a top-notch Compile shooter that deserves the strong reputation it enjoys today among hardcore fans of the genre.

Let’s first just make a checklist of all the things Space Megaforce gets right. Stunningly beautiful graphics with layer effects and varied environments? Check. Fast-moving action with good-looking sprites? Check. A complex system for power-ups that gives you incredible versatility in how you play? Definitely a check. A moderate level of difficulty that can be ratcheted up to madness for the hardest of the hardcore fans? Check, and doubly so in the Japanese version. A rocking soundtrack that pushes the action forward? Check, because it wouldn’t be a Compile game without it.

The story is the most insignificant part of the game, but here’s the gist of the North America and European version: a giant bio-mechanical metal orb arrives in Earth’s atmosphere and starts wreaking havoc around the world before it blows up a bunch of cities and begins building a huge orbital city above Central America, drawing its own version of Nazca lines in the terrain. As the pilot of the ED-057 aircraft, your job is to take down the floating city and then repel the invasion by heading into space and shooting down the orb itself.

In the Japanese version of the game, there’s considerably more to the story than this, including an alien girl co-pilot who came from the sphere and who factors into an ending that was cut in the North American and European edition. But given that this is a shoot ‘em up, most players also probably won’t miss it; what matters most is the action, and what Space Megaforce provides is really solid.

The game begins on Earth as the ED-057 begins fighting the defense systems of the object that’s drawing lines in the terrain. Right off the bat, things are visually quite impressive – the ground below is lush and green, and there’s a layer of clouds underneath you that gives the level a strong three-dimensional quality. The enemy fortress is enormous and filled with huge structures you have to navigate as you make your way towards the boss, a mega-sized ship that tries to trap you between its arms and which has multiple segments that must be destroyed before you can move on to the second area in outer space.

And this is where Space Megaforce utilizes some of the SNES’s hardware capabilities by slowly scrolling in an enemy platform beneath you while using a large rotating sprite layer to suggest that you’re descending towards it. Once you take out some of the structures, you’ll rise back up into space and rotate down for a strafing run from a different angle. It’s not quite as visually impressive as a 3D on-rails game like Silpheed, but it does a good job of making the action seem to go beyond the normal straight flight pattern of a scrolling shoot ‘em up.

Compile shooters are also known for their trippy backgrounds and effects, and those certainly come into play in Area 4 where an elastic background makes everything swirl around as enemy ships drop napalm-like solar flares fire around you. Area 5 pulses with canyons of crystalline formations below as you travel through the rocky terrain scraped off a planet, and many of the levels that follow it either have odd pseudo-3D backgrounds or more bases to sail through, often at a fast-moving clip. The final stage is so trippy and weird It’s hard to process exactly what you’re seeing since there are multiple layers of red and green biological patterns stacked on top of each other, waving about in truly unsettling patterns. If nothing else, Space Megaforce goes out of its way to use the SNES’s graphical capabilities to deliver some truly awesome and surreal visuals.

Like other Compile shooters, the power-up system is complex and requires studying the manual carefully to truly understand how to press your advantage. There are eight different weapons to pick up and each can be leveled up for more power, but the game also allows you to change your shot patterns with the R button, making some weapons more versatile than others and even offering limited control over some of the shots once they’re fired. This feature allows certain weapons to even change their behavior. For example, the laser weapon can be toggled between a straight array of shots and slower homing shots, and a beam weapon can be toggled between standard and quick charge modes to vary your speed and power. Each of the game’s eight weapons offer extremely different attack patterns as well, ranging from shots that explode into missiles, clusters of attack pods, homing missiles that spread out in all directions, big swirling green satellite shields and giant spheres of energy that can be fired in all directions.

Like many Compile shooters, it’s very easy to change weapons because power-ups are plentiful, and skilled players will switch between weapons regularly to deal with upcoming obstacles. As the game progresses, many areas move you along at a pretty high speed, so a split-second change in weaponry can spell the difference between success and failure.

One thing I enjoy about Space Megaforce is that it isn’t a bullet hell sort of shooter; enemies and their slow-moving shots are generally part of the game’s huge structures you encounter. There’s generally a logic and a rhythm to enemy patterns that requires managing waves of foes amidst blasting holes through the larger environments you’re flying through. Getting free of a restrictive area usually means harder enemies or boss battles are inbound, but the game has a strong pace that lets you breathe between moments so you’re not constantly getting killed by overwhelming enemy resistance.

This isn’t to say the game is easy, however; unless you play the “short game” mode (which reinterprets the levels in a brief experience), it’s about twice the length of a normal arcade-style shooter and the difficulty begins to ramp up a few levels in so that by the time you reach the game’s midboss base in Are 6, you’re going to have to have some mastery of the weapons systems and understanding of how to toggle alternate fire modes to your advantage. For those who really want a challenge, there are additional modifiers to make the game harder and the enemies more erratic.

One final note I’ll offer for this game is that the music is excellent, but also rather surprisingly relaxing for a game with such intense action. Normally I like my action games to lay off on the soft jazz and plinking keyboard sounds, but in Space Megaforce, the music helps to calm your nerves and keep you focused thanks to its strong beats and laid back minor key melodies. There’s even more music in the Japanese version because some of it apparently took a little too much inspiration from the band New Order and was stripped out of international releases.

Playing Space Megaforce today pretty much requires original hardware or emulation, and it’s an expensive game to pick up for your SNES because it’s so well-known among collectors for its quality and relative rarity. The Japanese version (Super Aleste) is the better one to play if you want the most content since it has additional cutscene content at the beginning and end of the game. Hopefully one day, we’ll get some modern releases of the 16-bit Aleste games to go along with the 8-bit Aleste Collection from 2020.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

We’re going to talk about adventure games from the 1990s that attempted to move the genre into three dimensions including The Longest Journey, Grim Fandango, Escape From Monkey Island, BioForge, Chronomaster and more! And we’ll also look at some of the odd offshoots of the genre like The Neverhood, The Last Express, Sanitarium and Twinsen’s Odyssey!

I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed!

If you’ve been hanging in there with us week after week, you might have wondered why I haven’t delved into talking about LucasArts’s last few adventure games, which are generally considered some of their best. But don’t worry – I haven’t lost the thread. I was just waiting for the right time to bring them back up, because LucasArts found itself on a very interesting trajectory between 1995 and 2000 as it released four adventure games that gradually evolved away from the style the developer had become famous for and into the 3D style we’re going to talk about in detail in this episode.

So let’s start off with Full Throttle, a point and click adventure game by Tim Schafer that came out in 1995 as a CD-ROM exclusive title. And this was actually a pretty big deal at the time because many adventure games to this point were still shipping on floppy disk editions with optional enhanced CD-ROM versions. Full Throttle certainly looked like a Day of the Tentacle or Sam & Max-style adventure at first blush, with hand-drawn sprites, painted backgrounds and an icon-driven point and click system.

But seeing this game in action made it clear why the multimedia features were needed, from the awesome theme song by the hard rock band The Gone Jackals to the cool cinematic sequences featuring the game’s protagonist, Ben, riding his fat, noisy Corley Motors motorcycle down the road and getting into scraps with rival gangs. In fact, a significant part of the game involves arcade action fighting sequences that are sort of like a cartoon version of the game Road Rash where Ben has to knock other bikers off their rides. Full Throttle turned out to be one of the best point and click adventures ever made, and it also gave Tim Schafer enormous license to try something wildly different with his next game, 1998’s Grim Fandango.

And wow, did Grim Fandango deliver, though it was a rather polarizing game among adventure game fans at the time because of the changes it made to the familiar formula of the genre. The game’s set in an afterlife based on Meso-American folklore and stars Manny Calavera as a grim reaper agent of death who helps guide departed souls to the appropriate place in the great hereafter. But when he meets a woman named Meredith who ought to be bound for eternal paradise aboard the number 9 train, but who’s somehow stuck in the lower levels with people who lived far less saintly lives, Manny realizes something’s up and that there are nasty souls who’ve decided to make themselves comfortable in the slums instead of trying to ascend to the heavenly realm. The game’s scope and imagination is, quite frankly, absolutely amazing, and it has a dio de los muertos vibe fused with a film noir art style that makes for an unforgettable story and experience.

But there was a practical reason for this style of art as well. Tim Schafer was trying to figure out how to bring adventure gaming properly into 3D, and more abstract character designs and pre-rendered backgrounds were better-suited to the relatively low-polygon capabilities of computer systems of the day. Grim Fandango also was designed to ditch the mouse cursor and GUI common to most adventure games and instead allow players to move Manny around with arrow keys and recognize areas of the world he could interact with by tilting his head – an elegant solution to having to wave a mouse pointer all over the screen in search of objects or characters who were interactive.

I really don’t want to go into much more detail about Grim Fandango because it’s such a brilliantly-made game that it’s held up over time and become regarded as a classic. But in the 1990s, it definitely wasn’t for everyone. Hardcore adventure game fans thought the gameplay was too linear and the puzzles were too easy, and navigating Manny around the backgrounds could be an awkward affair because of the odd shape of his body and the sometimes less-than-obvious pathways. The fixed camera angles were also awkward in the same way other 3D games like Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII struggled to fuse 3D characters and backgrounds.

Gamers who weren’t adventure fans, on the other hand, just thought the game looked weird, and since it was only available on CD-ROM and really needed a beefy computer with a 3D graphics card to run optimally, it’s no surprise that it was a commercial failure despite receiving fairly strong critical reviews. Remember, Grim Fandango came out during a major year for games – Half-Life, StarCraft, Thief: The Dark Project, Baldur’s Gate, Unreal, Starsiege: Tribes and Fallout 2 all came out that year as well on PC – and given the pedigree of those games, you can see what stiff competition it was up against.

Not that gamers were suffering from a lack of great games, because 1997 also happened to be an amazing year for computer gaming. And one of the titles that debuted was The Curse of Monkey Island, the last of the SCUMM engine games, but also by far the most sophisticated in terms of art design and multimedia features. With all of the original designers off doing their own thing, LucasArts turned to Larry Ahren and Jonathan Ackley to helm this sequel. Both had worked on other LucasArts adventures, and both eventually wound up working in theme park design, notably teaming up again in the early 2010s to work on the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom experience for Disney theme parks.

This is an interesting note because one of their jobs in reviving the Monkey Island games was to deal with the twist ending of Monkey Island 2, which heavily hinted that LeChuck and Guybrush were actually children playing in an amusement park called Big Whoop and the entire adventure had been make-believe, but that Chuckie was actually infused with some sort of demonic magic. How do you make a sequel to that?

Ron Gilbert would claim over the decades he knew exactly what was going to happen next, but to the LucasArts team responsible for continuing the story, the best choice was to pretend most of that never happened and to return Guybrush to the Caribbean, floating his way into a siege on Plunder Island where LeChuck and his undead pirate minions were busy trying to forcibly capture Governor Elaine Marley the same way Bowser is constantly trying to snatch and grab Princess Peach.

Honestly, this was a good choice. No offense to Ron Gilbert, who is a brilliant adventure game designer, but the Monkey Island 2 ending never sat right with me and risked undermining all the fun of a series that was part Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride and part On Stranger Tides pirate shenanigans inspired by Tim Power’s crazy 1987 novel.

And The Curse of Monkey Island added in a few nice new things that have stuck with the series since. The first is an all-star voice acting cast led by Dominic Armato, who nails the role of Guybrush so well he basically was the character we all heard in our heads all along, and he’s since voiced every Monkey Island game released, including the remasters of the originals.

And the same is true for the other voice actors, at least mostly – Earl Boen is LeChuck, except in the final game, because he was retired from voice acting. Alexandra Boyd is Elaine Marley, except in the fourth game for some reason where she loses her English accent and sounds completely different. Leliani Jones is the Voodoo Lady, except in Tales of Monkey Island. Neil Ross is Wally B. Feed, a.k.a. Bloodnose the Pirate.

And Denny Delk is Murray, the aggressively evil demonic talking skull, a brand new character introduced in this game who’s the second great addition. Every game since has included Murray, and he always steals the show.

The third addition is the ability to play the game in an easy, story-driven mode or a more challenging puzzle mode, and what I particularly like about this feature is that the puzzle isn’t just more difficult, but holds back some of the game’s best jokes and moments to reward players to pick the tougher path. Since the interface adopts Full Throttle’s icon-driven commands, The Curse of Monkey Island is more focused on pointing and clicking on the environment than the previous games, and it also runs in full-screen since the action menu pops up as a doubloon with regions to click for different interactions. This allows players to not only enjoy the scenery, but to search it for areas allowing them to do something. It feels less like a pixel hunt and more like a multimedia cartoon.

The game’s story, too, makes some smart choices as Elaine gets turned into a golden statue after Guybrush proposes to her with a cursed ring in the opening animated sequences and then sends him on a chase around Plunder Island, Blood Island and Monkey Island. The end of the game even attempts (rather confusingly) to retcon the whole Big Whoop issue by having LeChuck and Guybrush have a showdown on a roller coaster. The game puts all that stuff to rest, lets Guybrush triumph and rescue Elaine, and ends with them both getting married and, presumably, ready for a sequel.

But Escape From Monkey Island didn’t make it out until 2000, this time led by LucasArts vets Sean Clark and Mike Stemmle, who’d worked together before as the designers behind Sam & Max Hit the Road. This time, the series utilized the Grim Fandango game engine and eschewed the cel-animated style of the previous game for 3D characters. I don’t think I’m out of step with most series fans in saying Escape From Monkey Island is the weakest game in the entire series, and while it’s good by adventure game standards, it feels like a downgrade after the great leap forward The Curse of Monkey Island offered.

The plot feels like a “where do we go from here?” sort of contrivance and focuses on LeChuck pretending to be a gubernatorial candidate named Charles L. Charles trying to unseat Elaine Marley and acquire her family’s voodoo talisman that will unleash the Ultimate Insult. There’s a bad guy named Ozzie Mandrill who is constantly criticized for being an “Australian developer buying up everything,” which is a very dated reference to Rupert Murdoch. There’s also a parodic restaurant called “Planet Threepwood”, filled with references to the previous games in a manner that’s clearly making fun of the ill-fated Planet Hollywood restaurants and their penchant for displaying minor film props as major treasures.

And the second half of the game is bogged down by an enormously unfun sequence called “Monkey Kombat” where Guybrush battles the island’s simians with insulting monkey noises and eventually pilots a monkey mecha suit to defeat a giant statue of LeChuck.

It sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is. And despite some amusing moments and some great character interactions, there’s also a lot of silly stuff. Did we really need to know the origin story of Herman Toothrot or the lineage of the three-headed monkey?

After LucasArts stopped producing adventure games and a Sam & Max and Full Throttle sequel were both canceled, Mike Stemmle wound up moving over to Telltale Games and was involved in several of their adventures, including Tales of Monkey Island, for which he was a co-director, designer and writer.

This five-part series is actually pretty good in terms of its story and humor, preserving the art style of Escape From Monkey Island but also offering different gameplay experience, returning to a point and click interface that has Guybrush move around 3D environments and investigate interactive objects. I’d argue that the Telltale series is best for long-time fans, but it’s fairly standalone in terms of its continuity and I really enjoy some of the new characters, particularly Morgan LeFlay, a Guybrush fangirl and bounty hunter who becomes sorry to meet her hero, and who plays a significant role in this story.

As I mentioned, Ron Gilbert started teasing on social media that he’d always wished he could finish the Monkey Island trilogy with his planned third game because he had an amazing idea of where to take things from the ending he’d concocted for Monkey Island 2. Once Disney acquired LucasFilm, that seemed like it would never happen since Disney was even less interested than LucasArts in producing new games and LucasArts itself had been turned into a licensing arm. But then Ron Gilbert made the surprise announcement in 2022 that he was finishing up Return to Monkey Island for release later in the year along with several LucasArts veterans like Dave Grossman and David Fox at his current development studio, Terrible Toybox. While the game introduced yet another art style – this time sort of like paper dolls atop more stylized backgrounds – it initially underwhelmed some fans when it was shown off. And when it debuted that September, it finally brought a close to not only Ron Gilbert’s big idea, but also, surprisingly, the series itself.

Whether or not Return to Monkey Island effectively pulls off the idea Ron Gilbert was so excited about is a matter of taste. But is the game funny? Absolutely. Are the puzzles worthwhile? Mostly. Does the ultimate storyline pay off by finally revealing the Secret of Monkey Island? Pretty effectively, in my opinion, while still incorporating all of the continuity of the games Gilbert wasn’t involved in and showing respect for the contributions of the other creators. Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman even include a letter to series fans dated June 18, 2020 to talk about their perspective on the series at the very end. That’s about as nice of an ending as you could hope for, and I’d glad we finally got it.

But I want to point out that the Monkey Island series is a microcosm of many of the changes that the adventure gaming genre went through. It started off solving the problems inherent to the adventure game genre by removing pointless deaths and focusing players on actions they could do instead of the ones they couldn’t, then it evolved into one of the great multimedia adventure games, and then tried to move into a more console-friendly 3D style. As the genre returned to the flatter point and click 2D style, so did the final entry, and it de-emphasizes tough puzzles while adding in clues, comfort systems and lots and lots of self-awareness.

But before we move on to talking about other games that, like Grim Fandango and Escape From Monkey Island, took the adventure game genre into 3D, let’s briefly mention two games that took direct inspiration from Monkey Island to deliver pirate adventures worth playing. The first is called Voodoo Kid, and it’s a 1997 point and click adventure from Infogrames that uses digitized character renders and pre-rendered environments to depict a haunted pirate ship with a literal skeleton crew. The premise is that you fall asleep reading the story of Baron Saturday, who turned his crew into zombies and is heading for the Island of Lost Souls. In your dream, you awaken on the ship and have to find a way to divert the ship from its course. It’s a fairly short and easy adventure, definitely targeted at kids, but it at least allows you to pick if you’d rather play as a boy or girl and it’s fully voice-acted and well animated, with lots of fun little moments. The only downside is the puzzles, which tend to be along the lines of The 7^th Guest’s arbitrary brainteasers.

Another interesting game is Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, a 2009 game from Autumn Moon Entertainment first released in Germany that made it to the English-speaking world in 2010. Its biggest claim to fame is the involvement of studio co-founder Bill Tiller, a former LucasArts designer and artist who worked on The Dig and The Curse of Monkey Island.

Autumn Moon’s 2008 point and click adventure game A Vampyre Story was a reasonably good time, and I do recommend it, particularly if you’d like to play as a busty French vampiress and pull items out of a coffin to try to cast a spell to allow you to escape from the cursed castle in which you’re imprisoned. It’s a gorgeous game bursting with personality and which has an incredible soundtrack.

Autumn Moon’s follow-up game The Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island is a really interesting adventure because you play as a trio of ghosts named Papa Doc, Jane Starling and Blue Belly, all of whom are trying to get back into their bodies and who have to work together to solve their problem and then defeat the evil Queen Zimbi. While the characters are rendered in 3D, the backgrounds themselves are painted and multilayered, offering a strong sense of the artistry from The Curse of Monkey Island while also utilizing the fluid animation that 3D characters can provide.

If you enjoy the Monkey Island games, you should definitely give Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island a try. It definitely has its own vibe and is often seen as being lesser-than the Monkey Island series, but I think it stands on its own pretty well. The puzzles are decent, the voice acting’s good and the artwork and animation are spectacular! The Day of the Tentacle-style teamwork adds some variety to the game, and the characters are varied enough that they don’t overstay their welcome if they start to annoy you.

Unfortunately, Autumn Moon never got to make a true sequel to either of its adventure games, and the most we’ve gotten is episode one of Duke Grabowski: Mighty Swashbuckler! in 2016 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. It’s a great looking game very much in the piratey spirit of Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island, but after 10 years and some promises about four more episodes that have never manifested, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that we’ll ever see Duke’s adventures continue.

I mentioned Alone in the Dark in our last segment, and now seems like a good time to explain why I did. In 1992, Infogrames released this interesting horror-themed adventure featuring two 3D characters – Edward Carnby and Emily Hartwood – exploring a haunted mansion in Louisiana called Decreto. While Alone in the Dark certainly looked odd for its time due to its use of low-polygon, slow-moving 3D character models atop pre-rendered environments and static cameras depicting each room, hallway or scene, the game was able to create a mood unlike anything that had come before it, and while games like Elvira, WaxWorks and Harvester were going for gore, the Alone in the Dark games were able to build a much more unsettling experience that became the template for the survival horror genre that Resident Evil would later popularize.

It’s funny, though, because I don’t think many people consider Alone in the Dark an adventure game despite the fact that it’s not that different from The 7^th Guest or Dark Seed in terms of structure and design. One reason why it is a bit different is because it involves limited combat with enemies who can definitely kill you, but you’re still exploring a mansion and trying to find ways to solve puzzles with items. I think the best way to categorize Alone in the Dark is as an action adventure game that had an enormous influence not just on horror games, but also the burgeoning field of 3D adventures.

BioForge is definitely a game with a similar design philosophy. It’s a 1995 3D action adventure game from Origin Systems that still focuses on combat and horror, but which has a science fiction premise. After a cryptic introduction, you awaken as a cyborg in a derelict station aboard a moon somewhere in space. You not only have to fight your way through the robots and cyborgs left on the station – early in the game, you can literally beat one foe with his severed arm when he won’t stop attacking you! – but also get your bearings as you strive to understand what happened to everyone there.

I actually feel like BioForge is a little bit closer to an adventure game than Alone in the Dark because so much of it is focused on puzzle-solving. Many of the solutions to the puzzles are found by reading logbooks or computer monitors – an idea that’s pretty common today, but which was a fairly novel and immersive way of sharing information with the player in the mid-1990s. The game also has an unfolding cinematic story brought to life by voice acting and in-game events rather than cutscenes or narration, which was again pretty exciting for the era. While the gameplay itself is a bit clunky due to tank controls and lousy combat, there are several places in the game where you need to outsmart your enemies rather than beat them down, and that helps BioForge overcome its weaknesses somewhat. I definitely recommend it if you can put up with its limitations as an awkward 90s action adventure game.

Speaking of games set in futuristic settings, let’s take a look at Chronomaster, which came out the same year as BioForge, and which had the bona fides of being created by a famous Hugo and Nebula award-winning author.

Roger Zelazny was a science fiction writer who was very popular in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, particularly for his novel Nine Princes in Amber, which was the basis of an illustrated text-based adventure game adaptation by Tellarium in the 1980s. Those novels are about a true world called Amber that casts shadows across the multiverse to create every other reality. Some shadows have different laws of nature and even allow for magic. Zelazny loved the idea of alternate worlds and used them to play around with what was possible without violating the accepted rules of hard science fiction. The canon in the Chronicles of Amber thus tends to focus on the characters themselves, not the inconsequential worlds they inhabit.

Zelazny was also well-known for infusing mythology into his writing as well as a strong sense of action due to his prowess in fencing and various martial arts. If you’ve never had a chance to read some of Zelazny’s novels, you absolutely should; they’re often energetic and interesting, with fast-moving plots and cool characters and that overwrought, thoughtful, philosophical style of dialogue that’s so strongly associated with the wooden characters in science fiction magazines.

Chronomaster is not a novel, but a multimedia adventure game from 1995 that Zelazny was working on with his partner and collaborator Jane Lindskold when he passed away of cancer. The game was developed by DreamForge Interntainment [sic], a US-based studio mostly known for making Dungeons & Dragons games and other role-playing games like DarkSpyre and Veil of Darkness, which I’ll absolutely talk about another time when our discussion is centered on underrated 90s CRPGs. But Chronomaster is not like anything else DreamForge ever made, both before and after. It’s a 3D-style icon-driven point and click adventure game where you explore a pre-rendered game world as Rene Korda, a sort of godlike scientist who creates customized pocket universes for wealthy people with exacting tastes. He’s brought out of retirement to repair some universes that have entered a state of “temporal stasis” where everyone and everything is stuck in time.

And when I say pocket universes, I mean that literally, because within some of these, Korda can visit multiple worlds. This sense of scale is both the game’s greatest asset and its biggest weakness. As an adventure game, Chronomaster is absolutely massive. But on the other hand, the game definitely weakens as it goes on because the more focused science fiction story of the initial sections gives way to a wild, anything goes approach later on where the game nearly turns into a parody of itself as Korba begins exploring universes that are built to some very strange specifications.

One of the most notable aspects of Chronomaster is the voice acting, which is provided by Ron Perlman as Korba, Brent Spiner of Star Trek: The Next Generation as his eventual ally Milo and Lolita Davidovich as his chirpy computer assistant Jester. They all do a good job, though Ron Perlman sounds half-awake in a lot of his narration. But there are dozens of other characters who’re voiced in this game as well by a fairly large cast of actors ranging from suitable for the roles to absolutely amateurish.

The game also has a rather strange sense of art design. Korba is a goofy-looking character with spiky blond hair, opaque goggles and Halloween costume-level body armor, Milo sort of looks like an outer space Steven Seagal and Jester has the appearance of a Western comic book artist’s take on an anime girl. There’s also a later ally named Selene who’s wearing revealing spandex but who has a cybernetic eye and a crew cut so you’ll know she’s supposed to be tough. The ultimate bad guy looks like a reject from the Borg. All of this is rendered in that awkward mid-90s plastic uncanny valley style that looked dated the moment the game shipped.

Even so, you’ve got to overlook this game’s rough edges because the story is unique and interesting and the gameplay is rewarding if you can stick with it. The puzzles are quite challenging, but there is some openness to the design, with multiple solutions to many of the problems you face, making every playthrough feel a bit different if you don’t stick to a walkthrough. There are also a few different endings, so the game responds somewhat to your playstyle. There’s even one way to finish the game midway through, though I’ll note this is not the good ending.

Speaking of endings, DreamForge Intertainment inserts itself into the game’s ending newsreel, suggesting a pocket universe in which the company is still making wildly creative games today. Unfortunately, they’d wind up closing their doors while working on Myst IV a few years later, but before that happened, they created one of my favorite 3D-style adventure games of the 1990s – the very trippy and weird 1998 isometric adventure Sanitarium. At first blush, this game looks a lot like Fallout or Baldur’s Gate because you wander around pre-rendered environments viewing everything from a diagonal top-down angle. But the gameplay follows the mechanics of adventure games, putting you in the shoes of the fully bandaged coma patient Max, who awakens in a horrifying sanitarium and soon finds himself wandering around a village of mutant children who have been adopted by an evil alien they call “Mother.”

And just when you think you have a handle on where this game is taking you, the game throws you an incredible curveball I won’t spoil. As I was playing it, I assumed that it was going to turn out to be one of those games where Max turns out to be the villain facing his worst crimes in the form of a coma-induced nightmare so he can seek redemption, but nope, that is not at all where this game’s story ultimately goes. It’s definitely a game I’d describe as “messed-up,” but it’s not quite the horror experience it appears to be, so if you’re more a fan of psychological horror and tension as opposed to jump scares, this one is definitely worth a playthrough.

In the 1990s, video gaming got its first cover girl in the form of Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Core Design and Eidos’s self-assured polygonal gun-toting adventurer came at the right time to represent console gamers who were starting to outgrow Mario and Sonic, who were getting bored with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and who were ready for a little bit of sex appeal. That Lara Croft was one of the first 3D characters who managed to pull off being attractive rather than hideous didn’t hurt, and Core Design was more than happy to generate pictures of her in swimsuits and provocative poses to ensure every magazine had ample reasons to cover her.

PC gamers tended to be a little bit older in the 1990s than their console gaming counterparts, and so it’s not surprising that when April Ryan came around in the game The Longest Journey in late 2000 in the English-speaking world, most gaming magazines barely noticed it despite the fact that April spends the beginning of the game in skimpy pajamas and much of the rest of the game dressed in skin-tight clothes with a visible midriff like she’s headed to the club. But that also might be because April’s a stylish artist who’s not just tossed in the game for sex appeal, but part of a story where she can go and have lengthy conversations with her friends and neighbors and where she fits into the worlds she inhabits instead of plundering them.

The Longest Journey was originally released in Scandanavia and Europe everywhere but the UK by a developer called Funcom, largely known at the time for making licensed console games. While the game was a big hit in its home country of Norway and sold well in its neighboring countries, the decision to wait on an English-language release was primarily due to the desire to get the game into the North American market, not an easy feat since a lot of publishers wanted nothing to do with adventure gaming. And you can tell that the excitement for this game was not high despite the glowing reviews it received once it shipped; Computer Gaming World and PC Gamer gave far more pre-release coverage to Escape From Monkey Island than The Longest Journey, often in the context of discussions about whether or not the adventure game genre was truly dead.

The premise of the game is that there are two parallel worlds that have split off from the original Earth. One is called Stark, and we see it in the year 2209, with a similar history and culture to our own world, though it has a sort of steampunkish, science fictiony Blade Runner vibe and takes place within a fictional city on the US West Coast called Newport. It’s governed by science. The other world is called Arcadia, and it’s a lower-tech, fantasy-style place governed by magic.

April has a dream in which she meets a white dragon who tells her she’s going to play a part in a future that may bring about a different world. But before April can get any clarity on what this means, a force of dark chaos rises up beside her and shatters her dream, sending her back to her regular life on Stark, where she’s worried about finishing off a piece for an upcoming art show.

And yet April’s life keeps being interrupted by moments where strange things are happening, and there’s some subtext to suggest that maybe her dreams are being influenced by the things around her and she’s going crazy. But an odd man she encounters named Manny Cortez explains that she is special in some way. He eventually opens a portal to Arcadia and explains that once she steps inside, she will take the first step on the longest journey of her life.

And as April emerges in the other world, she finds she cannot understand anyone there, though her ears gradually acclimate to allow her to understand the magical Alltongue. This opens her up to learning from a priest named Tobias Grensret, who walks her through the backstory and explains that April is a Shifter, a rare person who can travel between both worlds. Both worlds exist in a balance that’s maintained by a dragon-like alien race called the Draic Kin, twelve humans called the Sentinel and a quasi-divine individual known as the Guardian, but he’s gone missing and his replacement has not been found. April eventually discovers that a group called the Vanguard is trying to merge both worlds back together, which will plunge both worlds into chaos, and her quest is to restore a disc that will help allow the Guardian to return.

I’m really oversimplifying things, because The Longest Journey has a very detailed storyline that is frequently dropped on April through lengthy conversations and info dumps. If you’re not into complex lore and detailed characters with complex motivations for doing things, this is definitely not the game for you. And if you assume that April is going to become the Guardian in the end, well, no, this game’s not that straightforward either. The entire experience is incredibly lengthy and this has often led gamers to joke that this game is aptly named – your first playthrough can easily last 15-20 hours if you sit through the conversations and work to solve the puzzles.

But oh, what a fantastic journey The Longest Journey has to offer! The game’s built on vibes, and so many of its ideas feel like they were inserted because the development team took some inspiration from something and decided to jam it into their game. Normally, this is the mark of a bad game, but the dreamlike feel of the adventure actually handles this structure really well. April’s young and naïve, but she’s no dummy, and her cleverness and ability to persevere carry her through this game and make you feel really attached to her by the end. The game even seems to hint that she survives to be an old woman in Arcadia, telling stories about her young exploits.

That’s why it was such a surprise that the sequel, 2006’s DreamFall: The Longest Journey, didn’t really continue April Ryan’s story so much as sideline her to introduce a new character named Zoe Castillio who’s living in the city of Casablanca in Stark in 2219, ten years after the first game. And from the start, you know that Zoe’s in a coma, telling you the story of how she got there. Zoe’s quest before the coma is to find and save April Ryan, who’s now living in Arcadia as a part of a resistance movement there, and Zoe begins receiving cryptic directions from a little girl named Faith whose consciousness exists in Stark’s global computer network, DreamNet. Zoe’s ultimate quest is to thwart a plot to infiltrate the dreams of people in both worlds and brainwash them, which sounds kind of stupid as I say it out loud, but I promise, it makes sense in the game.

DreamFall is an action adventure game, eschewing most of the traditional adventure game conventions and focusing more on combat. Like The Longest Journey, it’s filled with dialogue and complex lore. There’s a whole backstory about an event called the Collapse that isn’t even really explained in the game and the rise of an Arcadian faction called the Azadi and a conspiracy in Stark involving a mysterious Japanese toy company. Oh, and the world is being plagued with static that keeps knocking technology out. Again, as I say this out loud… just trust me, it’s not as dumb as it sounds, and the dreamlike quality of the game glosses over the silliness of the story.

Like The Longest Journey, DreamFall also draws obvious inspirations from all sorts of different things that were popular during its development – the films The Ring, AI: Artificial Intelligence and Lost in Translation are three of the most obvious influences just in the first few minutes of Zoe’s adventure, and many of the things that happen in Arcadia seem to be visually influenced by Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films this time around.

My only real gripe about DreamFall is that it ends April’s story rather unceremoniously and, in my estimation, to the detriment of the continuation of the series. When Funcom continued the story in their five-part episodic adventure game DreamFall Chapters in 2014-2017, they had to retcon this with a rather silly contrivance designed to bring April back into the fold. I really only recommend DreamFall Chapters in its 2017 Final Cut edition, and even then, only if you’re really interested in seeing how the story ends.

Let’s close out our look at 1990s adventure games with a few that don’t really fit neatly into any category. All of these games are absolutely excellent, and I hope you’ll check them all out. But the first is still not available commercially, and that’s a shame, because this 1996 adventure, The Neverhood is a really great game that was released by Dreamworks Interactive.

But before we begin, let me go ahead and rip off the band-aid and talk about Doug TenNapel, the artist and co-designer of this game who’s largely responsible for its distinctive look. Doug TenNapel is a brilliant animator who’s responsible for some great stuff, including some wonderful graphic novels and kids’ books, some cool album art for the band Five Iron Frenzy, many television shows from the 1990s and early 2000s and, most famously, for creating the character of Earthworm Jim and even voicing him in the first two games.

Dan Castellaneta, the guy who voices Homer Simpson, played Jim in the cartoon show. But Doug TenNapel was responsible for that show, too, which is probably why it does such a good job of sticking to the game’s goofy premise.

But here’s the thing. Doug TenNapel is a very problematic personality who’s allowed his very conservative Republican politics and support for figures like Andrew Breitbart and Donald Trump to tarnish his artistic career. He’d be the first to tell you this because he has talk show called Doug in Exile where he complains about being cancelled by the progressive left, SJWs and an LGBTQ culture he says is waging a culture war against him. I don’t believe I’m misrepresenting him in any way here, but I want to be clear: I don’t support or endorse anything he stands for. We’re all entitled to our opinions, but when we use those opinions to be hurtful to other people, we take it too far.

It really stinks when someone who’s so creative and who’s made some really cool stuff also turns out to be a heel, and if you don’t want to support Doug TenNapel, I understand. In that case, you should definitely skip the 2015 game Armikrog, which was intended to be a sort of spiritual successor to The Neverhood and which turned out to be a half-finished game in the end. Full disclosure: I was a Kickstarter backer, but I didn’t realize at the time that Doug TenNapel was such a polarizing figure.

Anyhow, The Neverhood is not a problematic game in any way, and since it was made by a team of people who have not followed Doug into exile as far as I can tell, let’s presume the game’s still worth checking out, because let me tell you – The Neverhood is truly something special. The game’s built from digital scans of claymation figures and offers some of the most imaginative point and click adventure gaming you’ll ever see. It also has one of the most tedious mechanics ever seen in an adventure game in the form of its seemingly never-ending “Hall of Records,” but we can forgive that because the rest of the game is so good.

The premise is that you are Klaymen, a misleadingly named clay man who wanders around the mysterious Neverhood searching for discs that fill in the game’s backstory and provide clues on where to go next. You wander around the world in both first-person FMV sequences and third-person screens representing puzzle rooms, and the game looks absolutely incredible because all of it is built on Claymation sets with professional-grade animation. Even more amazingly, the game’s soundtrack is an all-timer, filled with whimsical music sung mostly in a nonsense language and evoking a sort of jazzy, folksy, cinematic sense of whimsy that fits the graphical style perfectly.

The Neverhood is the type of game where you’ll fool a monster that wants to eat you with a dummy made of dynamite. It’s the sort of game where if you need to make a door to walk though, you just direct Klaymen to expand one out of a hole in the clay, shrinking another one elsewhere in the room. It’s the sort of game where it feels like anything and everything can happen and you simply need to figure out the right insane logic to open the game world up to your wild ideas. It’s also the only game I’ve ever seen where you defeat the bad guy by pantsing him when he thinks he’s won.

Aside from my gripes with the creator, my biggest complaint about The Neverhood is that it was only available for a short time and has never gotten a reprint or a digital release, making it extremely expensive to buy secondhand due to its rarity. And while it does have two follow-up games – Skullmonkeys on the PlayStation and the aforementioned Armikrog – neither is nearly as good as the original. If you get a chance to play it, you should.

Another game that bombed badly when it was released, but which is at least available digitally today, is Jordan Mechner’s 1997 rotoscoped mystery game aboard a train, The Last Express. Jordan Mechner was already a pretty big name for his publisher, Brøderbund – he’d created Karateka and Prince of Persia for them and essentially had carte blanche to do what he wanted, and that gave him an almost unheard-of four-year development period to see his idea through.

And wow, is The Last Express an impressive game even today. It begins sort of like an Agatha Christie meets Myst-style adventure aboard the Orient Express, but it has a few important deviations from that formula. First of all, the game takes place in real time at a pace of about six game minutes per actual minute. Secondly, the game will frequently break into rotoscoped Art Nouveau-style cutscenes in the third person where you see your character, the American doctor Robert Cath, interacting with other passengers. Finally, you have the ability to rewind time to undo the effects of any bad decisions you make, and you can also fast forward to later points in the story, provided you’ve already reached them once.

And yes, by the way, this mechanic was the inspiration for a key mechanic in Jordan Mechner’s next game, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, though it’s executed very differently there.

But what’s really wild about The Last Express is how detailed the game’s character interactions are. Every character in the game – there are about thirty of them – has an agenda and behaves differently depending upon the choices you make. Where they are and what they’re doing at a given time can vary a lot, and your conversations and inquiries can put some of them on edge. The script for the game is very well-written and has a lot of conversational dialogue that’s voiced extremely well and which feels authentic to the setting and the context of traveling on a train, including multiple languages where the characters speak natural dialogue. Your character also has to be careful not to blow his cover, as he’s assumed the identity of his murdered friend.

I don’t want to say too much about the story because part of the pleasure of the game comes from seeing how things unfold and finding the right path to reach the game’s true ending. Over the three days of your journey between Paris and Constantinople in 1914, you explore the Orient Express and discover a botched arms deal, a spy, another planned murder, a stolen Serbian treasure and so much more. The train gets hijacked at one point, and there’s even a bomber who threatens to blow the up the Orient Express and everyone on it. And all of this is happening while Europe is fast approaching the start of World War I, which breaks out if you survive to see the game’s ending.

The Last Express should have been a major success – it was a critical darling, attracted a lot of broader media attention and really looked like a game that everyone would want to play. But the problem was that Brøderbund was going through a tough time and its entire marketing department quit, resulting in the game being poorly supported and reportedly only being on the shelves for a couple of months. It wound up being one of their last games, and certainly their most expensive; their other adventure game that year, the comedy adventure Koala Lumpur: Journey to the Edge, was hardly a hit, and Brøderbund got acquired by The Learning Company the next year and was gutted by extensive layoffs.

One other unusual adventure I’d like to comment on is actually made up of two games. The first is known as Little Big Adventure in Europe and Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure in North America. And the sequel, called Little Big Adventure 2 in Europe, is also known as Twinsen’s Odyssey.

Both games were created by the French developer Adeline Software International, which also created the more conventional 3D action adventure game Time Commando in 1996. But the Little Big Adventure games, or Twinsen games if you prefer, are very different because they’re overhead isometric adventures where your main character, the blue-robed, top-knot ponytailed, dragon-riding Twinsen, has to solve problems in the normal adventure game manners – dialogue, puzzle-solving and with items – but also sometimes with his fists, his reflexes or with stealth. To enable these actions, Twinsen has four stances – Normal, Aggressive, Discreet and Athletic.

What makes these games a bit different from others in the genre is that like The Last Express, the action takes place in real time and parts of the map open up as you complete actions that unlock certain conditions or knock enemies off their routes and task schedules. It’s a very unique series that was quite a big deal in Europe, but which barely made a dent in North America because it was published by Electronic Arts and they simply didn’t understand its appeal, changing its title and making it look more like an action game than any sort of adventure game. That the game also shipped in a disk version and multimedia edition didn’t help, because the CD-ROM voice acting adds a lot of charm to the game.

The original Twinsen game features pre-rendered graphics with 3D character models on top of it, very similar to Alone in the Dark’s look, but with a far more family-friendly feel. Both take place on the world of Twinsun – named for the two stars the world sits between – and yes, it’s a little confusing that the hero is named Twinsen. But he’s such a likable and fun character who has a chipper personality and often over-exaggerates his movements, reeling back before he runs and throwing his magic orb weapon like a baseball pitcher. The second game keeps a lot of this style but also adds in portions that are actually 3D instead of pre-rendered, which means the camera is free to show things from different angles. It’s a little weird, but it absolutely works.

Unfortunately, Electronic Arts published the game in Europe and then handed the North American publishing rights off to Activision, which was similarly clueless about how to market a French adventure game that deviated so much from the Sierra and LucasArts formula.

But the good news is that both games are pretty easy to find and play today – GOG has them both and even has the original versions available as free add-ons, and they’re also on Steam. Be sure to give them a try – they’re wonderful family-friendly games with neat characters, strong art design and incredible soundtracks.

As usual, my desire to cover everything notable has gotten me into trouble, and I’m going to have to wait until we start talking more about the 21^st century to cover the next step in adventure gaming evolution with games including Omikron: The Nomad Soul, Fahrenheit, which is also known as The Indigo Prophecy, Microids’s adventure games including Amerizone: The Explorer’s Legacy, the Syberia games, Post Mortem and Still Life and Index+’s really wild Dracula: Resurrection series. All of these games are worth more than a name check and we’ll get to them in a future episode.

I don’t want to suggest that adventure gaming completely died after 2005, but it did change. Many of the characteristics of the 3D fork of adventure gaming were adopted into other genres such as action-adventure games, first person shooters, survival horror, role-playing games and even platformers, and aside from a handful of developers like Quantic Dream and Telltale Games, you really didn’t see a lot of adventure games coming out in 3D between 2005 and the indie gaming boom of the mid-2010s. Myst-style games, too, largely tapered off in favor of full 3D first person games like Portal, The Stanley Parable, The Talos Principle and Superliminal.

But adventure games remained a popular genre in Eastern Europe, and Daedalic Entertainment was one of the most prolific producers of the traditional style of 2D adventures, releasing series such as Edna & Harvey, Deponia and The Dark Eye as well as standalone titles like The Whispered World, Anna’s Quest, The Night of the Rabbit and A New Beginning.

And of course there were other adventure game makers as well. The Spanish studio Pendulo Games made the excellent Runaway: A Twist of Fate trilogy, the Czech studio Future Games made NiBiRu: Age of Secrets and the Black Mirror trilogy – no relation to the Netflix show of the same name - and various studios around Europe produced other halfway decent adventure games like Secret Files: Tunguska, Ceville, The Inner World and So Blonde.

Another popular breeding ground for adventure games was the Adventure Game Studio, and this led to hundreds of adventure games being developed and published, mostly as freeware, but in some cases as commercial titles. One of the most prolific publishers of AGS adventures is the indie studio Wadjet Eye Games, started by Dave Gilbert – no relation to Ron – and we’ll talk about them in much more detail in an upcoming episode. But there’s also of course Yahtzee Croshaw’s Fully Ramblomatic Games, Crystal Shard, AGD Interactive, Clifftop Games and Grundislav Games, just to name a few! And we’ll be covering them all as well in our last couple of episodes for this series.

But you know what we still haven’t covered in detail? Consoles and handhelds! So in our next episode, we’re going to talk about games like Adventure, Haunted House, Nightshade, The Space Adventure, Night Trap, Mansion of Hidden Souls, D, Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, Blazing Dragons, Scooby-Doo Mystery, Policenauts, Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure, Swagman, Steins;Gate, Clannad and Moon. And, if we have time, we may even delve into the incredible Sakura Taisen series, find a Zero Escape sort of dilemma or spend some time righting wrongs in the Turnabout Courtroom with an Ace Attorney on the rise!

If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.

And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!

I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRY

Before I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.

This week, I’m recommending Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, a game that came out last year from Pocket Trap and PM Studios and which promised the first “yoyovania.” OK, so that’s a clever little bit of marketing fluff, but what this game actually involves is a top-down puzzle-focused perspective like classic Zelda with a really capable yo-yo, far more useful than the one in the NES Startropics series. One of the most interesting ideas in the game is the ability to use angled surfaces to change the direction of your yo-yo so you can hit enemies at different angles and solve some surprisingly clever puzzles. The further into the game you get, the more abilities you earn for your yo-yo to allow you to resolve puzzles that weren’t previously possible to solve.

The game also has a goofy story about restoring your family’s power plant, which has been raided by gangsters who’ve made off with four powerful batteries. As the bat creature Pippit, you have to use your super-charged, spectrally-infused yo-yo that’s carrying the spirit of your auntie to catch up to the gangsters and set things right. Most of this is just a rationale to offer four different themed areas representing the elemental powers of the batteries, and the story’s probably the least interesting part of the game. It’s all about puzzle-solving, room-clearing action. There’s also a city hub world you can wander around and complete missions so you can upgrade your moves.

Oh, and did I mention one prominent song in the game’s score is by the great Yoko Shimomura, composer for Street Fighter II, Super Mario RPG, Parasite Eve, The Legend of Mana and Kingdom Hearts, among many other games?

If you’re the sort of person who really enjoys the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance Zelda games with all their timing and technique-based puzzles, this is the game for you. It even can be set to look like it’s playing on an approximation of the Game Boy Advance, which is pretty neat! Give Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo a shot – it’s one of last year’s best retro-style indie games, and you won’t regret playing it!

A List of Adventures I Didn’t Cover!

Each of the following adventure games is interesting for some reason. I won’t defend them all as being great, but give them a shot - you may find a new game you absolutely love! (Listed by year, then alphabetical)

• Eternam (1992) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1368/eternam/)

• Dragon Lore: The Legend Begins (1994) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/3776/dragon-lore-the-legend-begins/)

• Normality (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1999/normality/)

• Time Commando (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/342/time-commando/)

• The City of Lost Children (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/3842/the-city-of-lost-children/)

• Dark Earth (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2874/dark-earth/) - The first game I ever reviewed!

• Koala Lumpur: Journey to the Edge (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/4462/koala-lumpur-journey-to-the-edge/)

• Mission Sunlight (1998) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/100362/mission-sunlight/)

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

RELEASE DATE: 1991

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Quest

BEST VERSIONS: TurboGrafx-16

After discussing the Cotton series, it might seem like overkill to profile yet another cute shoot ‘em up about a broom-riding witch who’s flanked by two stars that function like the invincible pods in Psychosis. But Magical Chase really is that good of a game that it’s worthy of some discussion, and because of its high quality and meager print run, it’s also one of those games that’s pretty much impossible to play outside of either going for the Japanese versions or acquiring a ROM and running it on an emulator because the North American version is so rare that even the game’s manual sells for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Collectible prices don’t always indicate a great intersection between quality and rarity, but in this case, the collectors have it right. Magical Chase is a stunning little shoot ‘em up with six stages, some fun boss encounters and a lot of charm thanks to its great graphics and music. Rather than taking the approach of the Cotton games and providing any sort of in-game story, Magical Chase sends you on a quest to seal six demons your character, Ripple, accidentally set loose on the world. According to the manual (which I’ve only found in Japanese), Ripple’s in danger of being turned into a frog if she doesn’t fix her mistake. Ripple is accompanied by the Elf-Star maidens Topsy and Turvy (also known as Kururun and Gururun), who serve as her shields and support fire.

Mechanically, Magical Chase is a fairly fast-moving sidescrolling shoot ‘em up with a fantasy theme and the inclusion of the occasional shop for upgrading Ripple’s powers, purchasing spells or health or changing her speed from straw (slow) to cotton (normal) or feather (fast). To fund her upgrades, Ripple must collect crystals from the enemies she destroys. A few will also give her candy she can use to replenish her health bar at the bottom of the screen. And if Ripple has the appropriate spells, she can reclaim more health or unleash power attacks with the help of her star allies. One type of spell allows Ripple to heal, one allows her to make bullets vanish and one allows her to power-up her star maidens. She can also extend her life bar or buy an elixir that restocks her health when she runs out. In the abstract, it sounds like a perfectly average game that isn’t too different from the likes of Fantasy Zone or Parodius.

But the devil’s in the details, and in this case, the six devils Ripple has to track down and seal are each contained within some creative levels that feature some excellent enemies and midbosses. The initial stage, which looks like a town built out of Tetris bricks in the Japanese original and a medieval castle in the North American version, features some whimsical and fairly nonthreatening foes like bouncing toys, flying pigs, a guy in a bird costume running on top of a beach ball, some guys riding hoverboards and, for whatever reason, chicken heads with protruding legs running along the path. The mid-boss fits the geometric theme of the Japanese version because he’s a red block with evil-looking eyes and teeth inside the dark portion that appears when he opens his lid who summons other blocks to aid him. The boss, on the other hand, is a demon with a tin man automaton he uses to attack Ripple. Once it’s finished, he makes a valiant effort to fight by himself before being defeated and sealed.

This early stage, while certainly not impossible to complete on the first try, is fairly challenging until you master the controls. The game’s pretty fast as is, but Ripple has to learn how to utilize the star maidens properly to be able to survive. Holding the fire button triggers autofire and causes the stars to fire opposite whatever direction Ripple last moved, like cover fire. Pressing the second button locks or unlocks their position and allows Ripple to reposition them. Tapping the fire button casts the spells she can purchase and stock in the status bar below the action pane.

With these moves mastered, Ripple can tear through the first few stages by using the shield maidens to block enemy attacks and timing spells to benefit her during mid-boss and boss battles. Because the game has a health bar instead of lives and offers several ways to refill it, there’s a gentle learning curve to the trial and error required to defeat bosses. On the standard difficulty, Ripple can also continue an unlimited number of times on any stage with her gems and power-ups intact. This helps to make the game a bit easier to complete because the more challenging stages on the back half of the game can still be defeated with a brute force approach. (And for those who still can’t do it, there is a cheat code to get enough gems to make Ripple pretty powerful, though this doesn’t work on the final stage since there’s no shop there!)

The later stages are really something, though. The third stage has Ripple moving between the top and bottom of an airship and avoiding getting crushed, dodging enemies who pop out of portholes and pipes and eventually facing a foe who uses those travel points to disappear and pop out. The fourth stage looks like it was built out of toys and moves like a slowly scrolling maze, forcing you to carefully pick the right paths and timing to get through. And the fifth stage, which takes place outside an ethereal city, has twin snowmen in hockey masks for the mid-boss encounters, flying cats that hover like blimps and teams of dragons who fly around in circles. And even the sixth stage, which is basically just a boss rush mode before the final showdown with the last demon, is at least nice to look at.

As I mentioned, Magical Chase is a game you’re probably going to have to play through emulation, and please be thankful that ROM dumps of the game exist so you don’t have to track down an expensive collectible copy. The PC Engine version is much less expensive and plays almost identically save some graphical differences, so it’s a good option if you want to own a copy. There was also a pretty decent Game Boy Color port in Japan and a Windows 95/98 port of the PC Engine version in Japan, both of which are also easy to track down if you know where to look. Unfortunately, Quest’s games library is now owned by Square Enix and they don’t seem too eager to preserve much of anything Quest did beyond Tactics Ogre, so I wouldn’t hold your breath for an official re-release.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

RELEASE DATE: 1991, 1994

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Success / Sega (Cotton), Datam Polystar (Cotton 100%) and SunSoft (Panorama Cotton)

BEST VERSIONS: Arcade (Cotton) Super Famicom (Cotton 100%), Mega Drive (Panorama Cotton)

I know I’m pushing the limits of my credibility here by recommending three witch-based shoot ‘em ups in one piece in a section where we’ll also be taking about Magical Chase and Mystic Riders later on, but hear me out – the Cotton series is absolutely worth playing through in its entirety because it just keeps getting better and better as it goes. While the Cotton games have a cult following in the Western world today, they were largely unknown outside of Japan during the 1990s. It wasn’t until very recently with Rocket-Engine Co.’s Cotton Reboot! In 2021 that gamers around the world could try these games out without either using an emulator and game ROM or being one of the lucky folks who could afford a TurboGrafx-CD Super CD-ROM² and the very pricey now-collectible disc needed to play the original game.

The Cotton games are, first and foremost, a lighthearted anime-style shoot ‘em up series that are known for their strong artistic aesthetics. The team at Success worked together closely on the first several games and their artist (and former anime animator) Hideki Tamura created some wonderful character designs that have endured throughout the series, creating a nice dynamic between the greedy but seemingly good-hearted red-haired, blue-robed young witch Nata de Cotton and her scantily-clad, red-haired fairy ally named Silk, who works for the fairy Queen Velvet. Cotton has also been a fully-voiced character from the start (in Japanese), adding to her appeal as being anime-like and not just a generic video game character.

The first game, Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams is so adorable that it’s often close to the top of online lists you’ll find for the subgenre of cute ‘em ups despite coming out half a decade after earlier genre standards like Twinbee, Fantasy Zone and Parodius. The idea of the original game is that the world has been covered in darkness thanks to an evil mist. Cotton meets a fairy named Silk who asks her to help defeat the foes behind the evil. Cotton isn’t interested until she learns that something’s in it for her – a special pink candy called “Willows” that exist in seven flavors and which Silk assures Cotton will turn into a mega-candy when they’re all collected. It’s all a ruse, of course – the Willows happen to represent the colors of the light prism of fairyland called the Crystal of Light that can beat back the mist, and the fairies are manipulating Cotton into being their champion.

This is all a (rather poorly translated in the game, it must be said) pretense for flying around on a broom and casting spells at enemies while Silk and her fairy sisters serve as options flying around Cotton and adding to her firepower. Cotton can fire forward fireballs of her own (which can be upgraded 12 times by filling an experience bar with yellow crystal power-ups she acquires) as well as bombs she can drop on the ground. She can also collect spells she can unleash that function like power attacks when you hold down the fire button.

As shoot ‘em ups go, Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams is primarily known for its fast-moving gameplay, its wonderful graphics, music and sound effects and its creative enemies. It’s a competent and surprisingly challenging horizontal shooter, but players who take the time to master the upgrade system and learn how to deploy spells at the right time will find that the game rewards skillful play rather than forcing a lot of trial and error and memorization patterns.

Cotton’s antagonists vary as she travels between the game’s six different stages battling themed mid-bosses and minibosses. The first stage takes place in a village and has a couple of statue heads to fight amidst an assortment of strange creatures such as flying eyeballs and axe-chucking Norsemen. The second stage takes place in a graveyard and features evil pumpkins and horrifically smiling clouds as well an evil tree and a showdown with Death himself. A floating sky island is guarded flying imps and kunai-daggerish sharks as well as a fiery dog named Balrog and a naga-like, heavily armored creature named Medusa. Some of the later bosses are also interesting, including a rather voluptuous female statute called Sphynx that has a snakey head protruding from its midsection’s lion’s mouth, a Swamp Thing sort of plant monster named Dracula for some reason, a long-necked purple dragon and Cotton’s primary series antagonist, a blue-haired demoness named Wool who seems to be the director of all of the mischief causing the evil mist in the first place.

Märchen Adventure Cotton 100% is the game’s console sequel and it’s essentially the same basic experience and story with all new levels and graphics. While the arcade original Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams looks great on the Sega System 16 board, the sequel looks absolutely incredible on the Super Famicom hardware and eschews the darker look of the original game for something so bright and colorful and absolutely eye-popping that it feels as sugary as the candy Cotton’s trying to acquire. The bosses are also even more creative – the statues from the first level become a floating clown mask and a jack o’ lantern, Death is replaced with a Lolita-style doll and the evil tree from the previous game is upgraded into the far more formidable Mangrover, which even has a squirrel ally who will drop fruit bombs from its nose. There are also unusual new bosses that include everything from a baseball player snowman, a subterranean armored serpent named Snake Turtle that pops out of the ground and swings its bladed head around and flaming hen named Fried Chicken that lives in volcanic magma and tosses drill-like rocks as she lays eggs that hatch into chicks to help her.

The end of Märchen Adventure Cotton 100% also adds in a new twist just before the showdown with Wool – an Evil Cotton who summons monsters to aid her. The final stage contains both of these battles and it is amazingly epic, with Cotton fighting her evil self in a fast-scrolling interior of the Mirror Palace before heading outside for a thunder and lightning battle with Wool in the sky.

If I have any complaints about these games, it’s that they are single-player and have a lackluster checkpoint-based continue system that makes them a bit more challenging than many other arcade and console shoot ‘em ups of the day. These concerns are definitely addressed in the later sequel Cotton 2 and the subsequent games, reboots and follow-ups, which mostly follow the same style of gameplay. That’s absolutely fine because the Cotton formula is so good that it doesn’t need much refinement.

But then there’s Panorama Cotton on the Sega Mega Drive, which is something else entirely, and quite honestly one of the coolest games Noth Americans never got to play until very recently thanks to a modern console release.

The game’s story is entirely in Japanese (but is fan-translated here) but manages to be the best one yet. The introduction recaps the story so far and it becomes clear pretty quickly that Silk wrote it since it’s full of effusive praise for her own beauty and deeds. But there’s no time to hear it all; the fairy Queen Velvet starts acting strange and departs for another dimension. The reason for her insanity turns out to be that that someone’s burning the willows. Silk realizes that of course only Cotton can stop the villain who’s doing this, and this time, it’s personal, because Cotton really loves those candies.

The idea of Panorama Cotton is to take the gameplay of the 2D horizontal sidescroller and reformulate it as a chase cam faux-3D scaling sprite shoot ‘em up like Space Harrier. Because the Cotton games are already so fantastic in theme, the effect works surprisingly well. The player controls Cotton from behind, riding her broom and shooting directly ahead, as Silk the fairy flies around and helps her out. The gameplay is fast-moving and frantic, transitioning between areas regularly to adjust the backgrounds, enemies and direction of movement to provide the idea that the player is traveling through real three-dimensional environments. The first level begins over a river with rocky arches only to transition to curving checkerboard corridors and a dark path towards treacherous mountains in rapid succession. Cotton then heads through a tunnel and emerges in an underground cavern where she battles her first boss, the floating urn Mr. Corgen, while chipping away at a green bridge that’s in the way. The second level takes Cotton along a roadway and then up into the stratosphere where she dodges mines and sky islands and obelisk-headed girls leaping up out of the clouds to try to impale her with their pointy hats and… you just really have to see it to believe it. The same could be said for her descent into a Hellish subterranean city with glowing, wavy magma-spewing volcanos in the distance, her ascent into a golden palace where she encounters the game’s villain Calmin and the subsequent chase through a shimmering forest and heavenly mist where she defeats him.

Those who can finish the game on hard mode with over 1,000,000 points are in for another treat – a Reverse Mode where the player plays as a full-sized Silk with a shrunk down Cotton as an assistant. While it’s a little uncomfortable due to Silk’s scanty clothing and being forced to view her from behind for the entire game, completing this mode leads to a few additional screens of text where the developers apologize for not having more space on the cartridge to provide more than a belly button power-up for Silk and then provide some inspirational words for those who might be disappointed.

The only thing about Panorama Cotton that isn’t quite as good as the 2D games is the boss encounters, largely because they have to function within the faux 3D space and can’t be quite as inventive. But the game itself is so incredibly fast and fun and gorgeous-looking that it’s a small complaint. What’s more, it also has a great soundtrack and more of the wonderful character art that’s seen throughout the series.

If you want to play these games today, the good news is that they’re readily available on modern consoles and PCs thanks to HAMSTER Corporation, ININ Games and a publisher called Beep that’s produced Cotton Reboot!, which includes the arcade and Sharp X68000 versions. Success Corp. has even produced a 2023 sequel called Cotton Rock ‘n’Roll – Superlative Night Dreams that has crossover characters from many other Japanese indie games. That you can play pretty much the entire run of classic Cotton games on the Switch or PlayStation 4 today feels like the way retro games are supposed to work, and I wish more classic series had that level of support and enthusiasm.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

We’re going to talk about all sorts of pre-rendered and full motion video adventure games from the 1990s that attempted to move the genre forward including Myst, The Journeyman Project, the Tex Murphy games, the 7^th Guest and more! And we’ll also hitch a lift aboard the Starship Titanic, a game created by Douglas Adams!

I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed!

Before we begin this episode, full disclosure – I sort of hate the game Myst.

OK, so I don’t actually hate it the way I hate pineapple on my pizza, because there’s nothing really wrong with Myst. It’s just never gelled with me as a game and I don’t find it very entertaining or interesting. And I think it’s important to mention my bias up front because we’re going to spend some time today talking about games with pre-rendered environments, full motion video and full-on 3D, and like a lot of adventure game fans, I actually prefer the classic pixel art style of early 1990s adventure games to many of these mid to late 90s games.

But given that we’ve already talked about quite a few games that adopted and used these newer styles, let me also explain why I’m not a fan of Myst and many of the games that followed in its wake.

They remind me of theme parks.

That might sound like a strange comparison, but I’ve been to quite a few theme parks, and the experience is usually the same. I spend a lot of time walking around, looking at things, trying to figure out how to get to those far-off things that look really fun, and then when I finally get there, I still have to find the entrance to the rides and wait in line, often with minimal entertainment along the way. Then I get on the ride, and it’s fun for a few minutes, but a lot of the rides have these weird stories they want to tell, often in really boring and non-interactive ways. When the ride’s over, I’m back to looking for someplace else to go and something else to occupy my time.

I’d estimate the fun ratio at a theme park is probably 1 fun minute to every 20 minutes of drudgery. And it can vary more than that. Sometimes you go on a less busy day and things are better, and sometimes you go on a day where the rides are broken or closed down due to weather and it’s worse. There are ways to optimize your fun, and there are also ways to cheat. But all in all, you’re spending a lot of time not having fun and a good deal of your time bewildered by stuff that’s there to keep you from realizing how bored you are.

And to me, that’s Myst. It didn’t impress me in 1993 because I was playing adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Quest for Glory I: So You Want to Be a Hero? and Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers during that time.

But Myst was more popular than all of them, and we’re going to talk about why in a moment. But let’s back up a bit and talk about Myst’s developer, Rand and Robyn Miller’s studio Cyan, which started out on the Macintosh with the imaginative Alice in Wonderland-style kids adventure The Manhole in 1988 before they developed two other games called Cosmic Osmo in 1989 and Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo in 1991.

We don’t need to spend a lot of time talking about either of these games; they’re both very similar to The Manhole in that they involve walking around imaginative fantasy lands depicted on static screens and interacting with objects, cartoon characters and light puzzles and minigames. They provide the template for Myst, but these games are all really geared at children.

So, how did Cyan make the jump to more adult-oriented puzzling?

As we’ve discussed before, the Macintosh already had a few games that provided exactly that experience – ICOM Simulations’s quadrilogy of “MacVenture” games including both Deja Vus, Shadowgate and Uninvited. And the Amiga and Atari ST also had a couple of games in the same vein published by Psygnosis and developed by SARL Infomedia called Explora in France and Chrono Quest everywhere else.

There was also a third Explora game, by the way, but it never made it out of France.

All of these games were mouse-driven, utilized graphical user interfaces to allow players to interact with the game world and utilized a first person perspective that allowed players to move through static screens into different rooms to locate items and puzzles.

Cyan’s games did a lot of that already because they were built using a tool called HyperCard that allowed the games to showcase full-screen graphical images and then let players click around to interact with things, removing the need for a clunky interface for verbs and inventory items. Their children’s games also already had a baked-in philosophy of no deaths and no enemies, so they kept that intact as well.

Another thing the Millers realized was that they could create pre-rendered graphics and have them display instantaneously and in full color rather than using graphics drawn by the software itself. This created files that were far too big to put in large quantities on diskettes, but with the CD-ROM format, Cyan could include an entire world’s worth of pre-rendered still images plus some full motion video and high-quality digital audio to help make the world feel more alive and interesting. The only real limitation at the time was that CDs were slow, but there were lots of ways to mask that by compressing files, using lower color bit depth and ensuring that files needed for areas near the player were loaded into memory before they were reached.

The result is a game where you play as an adventurer discovered a book about the mysterious island of Myst, only to get pulled into the world depicted within and to discover it was a trap, and the only way to escape is to explore the island and aid two brothers who communicate with you through books you find early on in the island’s library, but these books are missing pages. You eventually have to visit different sections of the world called “ages” that are self-contained and which each have the missing pages you need, but which also reveal a deeper secret about a green book and a third person who’s part of a broader dynasty that ties into later games.

It’s all a fun magic trick, and Myst really was a clever game for its time. When you consider that Doom was released the same year and offered a disk-based realtime 3D action game engine that felt like stepping into virtual reality while Myst used a wildly different multimedia approach that made people feel like they were entering an entirely open world, you can see why both games became massively influential.

And Myst was undisputedly the best-selling computer game of the 1990s, selling over 6 million copies worldwide and becoming one of the strongest arguments for upgrading to a multimedia system. People who didn’t like games loved Myst; it was the equivalent of Wordle for the time because it was accessible, fun, and just challenging enough to captivate ordinary people.

But does it hold up? Eh. It’s not my cup of tea, but it’s definitely got a huge following. Today we have no shortage of Myst variants to play, including full 3D and even virtual reality versions as well as a bunch of sequels, spiritual successors and even a 1996 parody game called Pyst. The direct sequels to Myst ran through 2005 and include Riven, Myst III: Exile, Myst IV: Revelation and Myst V: End of Ages as well as the 2003 spin-off Uru: Ages Beyond Myst and Myst Online: Uru Live, and MMO game which you can still play today for free if you really want to.

Cyan rebranded as Cyan Worlds in the early 2000s and has since produced another Cosmo Osmo game, and two crowdfunded adventures called Obduction and Firmament which are best known for their VR modes, but which are really just sort of variations on the same theme.

Myst had some competition at the time, however, a multimedia adventure game by a developer called Trilobyte that also used pre-rendered video footage and stills to depict a haunted mansion where a murder mystery could unfold. This game, the 1993 CD-ROM classic The 7^th Guest, also sold millions of copies, and while it was not quite as successful as Myst, it’s often regarded, along with Myst, as one of the three killer apps that drove PC users to install multimedia upgrades.

The third killer app, by the way? Star Wars: Rebel Assault, an action game that also shipped in 1993 and sold over a million copies. But we’ll save it for another time.

The 7^th Guest is a game about exploring a haunted mansion where ghostly figures float around and re-enact a gathering at the house where something clearly went wrong, sort of like a game of Clue where everyone wound up getting killed. But the game begins with a surprisingly involved introduction about a ne’er do well named Henry Stauf who starts out as a thief, but begins having strange visions of dolls and toys, which he decides to create and sell. He’s rewarded with great wealth and prestige for the things he makes, but some of the children who own his toys start dying. He then sees a vision of a mansion, which he builds out on the edge of town, and he invites six people to come for dinner, asking them to bring along a mysterious 7^th guest.

Who that guest is becomes the basis of the game’s peculiar story, and it’s very much in that “theme park” kind of vein where things happen but they’re hard to follow until you really dig in and try to understand what, exactly, is happening. Much of the game involves moving from room to room and solving puzzles as Stauf taunts you for some reason, but most of the puzzles aren’t that challenging and give you clues that help you to solve them. If you’re not invested in the story – and honestly, it’s so hammy I doubt that most people would be – the game’s really just an excuse to throw a bunch of archaic and disjoined puzzle minigames at you.

But what made The 7^th Guest such a popular game at the time was the presentation, and the game’s use of full screen full-motion video and pre-rendered artwork really does elevate the otherwise simple gameplay and give the game the vibe of exploring a place that truly is haunted by ghostly apparitions that show up transparently against the game’s environments and relive their traumatic evening over and over. It feels like what 3D first person action adventure games would eventually evolve into over time, and if you play more modern titles in the same vein like Gone Home, Soma or What Remains of Edith Finch, you’ll see how those games share a lot of design sensibilities with The 7^th Guest.

Trilobyte also released a 1995 sequel called The 11^th Hour that continues the story 70 years later with some new visitors to Stauf’s mansion, but it’s essentially the same design with a far more convoluted story that’s also a lot darker in its themes, though with the production values and dialogue of a basic cable movie. Much like Phantasmagoria’s sequel, which really ramped up the sex and violence, The 11^th Hour attempts to introduce more mature R-Rated content and play up the horror. The problem is that it’s so cheesy and the tone is so jarring that it doesn’t land quite as well as Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh does.

But let’s talk about a couple of other series that were also quite prominent in pushing forward the full motion video-style adventure game. The first is a trilogy of games released in 1993, 1995 and 1998 by Presto Studios called The Journeyman Project that take place in a far-future setting where the Earth has finally settled down into a peaceful monoculture and an alien collective called the “Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings” has invited Earth to join its interplanetary alliance. Unfortunately, the human government is also in possession of a scrapped time machine called “Pegasus” that someone has used to go back in time and alter human history so they can nix humanity’s chances of joining the alliance. As the Temporal Security Agent known throughout the games as “Agent 5,” you have to travel to several key points in time to stop robots that have been programmed to interfere with humanity’s growing acceptance of the aliens’ offer. It’s a neat science fiction premise and it’s told through a combination of pre-rendered scenes and full motion video talking head animations, though the game’s not nearly as impressive as Myst and has a far more complex interface that takes up much of the screen. The puzzles are also significantly harder to solve, and the original build of the game was so slow and unwieldy that it required some dedication to get through.

The second and third game extend this story but also go a bit broader by sending you back into deeper parts of human history so you can stop another Temporal Security Agent who’s in league with an alien race that’s opposed to the Symbiotry of Peaceful Beings. You then move into pure speculative history and investigate mythical cities like Atlantis that have a connection to an even older alien race. And yes, the plot sounds kind of cliché today, but believe it or not, that unfolding story is what drives The Journeyman Project games and keeps them interesting. The villains have really strong motivations behind what they’re hoping to accomplish and the time travel mechanics are decently thought out to ensure that the considerable plot holes inherent to the genre aren’t a problem here. If you can put up with the limitations of these games, particularly the first one, The Journeyman Project is a great series to dive into. Just be warned that each game is longer than the last, and you’ll spend as much time on the third game as the first two combined.

Unfortunately, those are really the only games I’d recommend from Presto Studios aside from Myst III: Exile, which they released in 2001 before they shut down in 2002. During the 1990s, they also released a Mobile Suit Gundam interactive movie, a sequel game to the feature film Star Trek: Insurrection called Star Trek: Hidden Evil and a minigame collection called Stephen King’s F13, all of which are pretty awful.

Speaking of awful games, let’s go ahead and rip off the band-aid and talk about Activision’s foray into full motion video adventure games with 1993’s Return to Zork.

And I’m going to be frank here and say that I despise this game and its entire premise.

So here’s the thing about Return to Zork. What we should have gotten was a game that attempted to revisit and visualize the familiar environment of the Great Underground Empire, perhaps with some new twists to keep things fresh, similar to the way Super Metroid took the original game and then added quite a bit more to it in order to build on the experience. Instead, this game starts off with an introductory video at the boarded up house from the original Zork and has you open up the mailbox so that you find an orb in which a man appears and tells you that you’ve won a sweepstakes prize to visit the Valley of the Sparrows.

But the man starts shouting as if something bad is happening to him offscreen and you don’t even get to see if it was a grue or something far worse.

The game teleports you away to a place now called the Valley of the Vultures, and you wind up exploring a town called Shanbar, which is being threatened by an evil presence named Morphius that’s brought vultures and trolls to the area, turned a bunch of people into statues and given everyone else nightmares.

You have to spend a good chunk of the game aboveground, talking to local residents who exist in a modern-day setting. You eventually learn how to play a board game called Survivor and also have to take pictures of things with your camera or persuade NPCs to trust you using a dialogue system that allows you to set your tone.

At which point, any Zork fan is probably just going to raise an eyebrow and say, “huh?” because this is very out of line with the previous two trilogies as well as Zork Zero and Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor. It’s pretty telling that none of the original creators worked on this game, because it doesn’t look, feel or play like any of the classic Zork text-based adventures.

One of the things that aggravates me most about Return to Zork is how cheesy and poorly designed it all looks. The interface is a mixture of illustrated icons and digitized pictures, and the full motion video is inconsistent, flipping between moving rendered scenes and digitized photographs of actors whose mouths and eyes will move as they speak, but who otherwise stand still… except for when the designers decided to film them moving, which is, again, quite inconsistent. The filmed sequences are really amateurish and make no attempt to use practical effects beyond some light makeup and local theater-grade costumes – if your idea of a fairy is a woman in a yellow dress with a transparent blue cape hanging off her shoulder for wings or if your idea of a troll is a guy with poofy glam rock hair and a necklace made out of pointy teeth, have I got a game for you.

Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands came out in 1996 and it’s a far better game in terms of visual design and interface. It’s a prequel to Return to Zork, so it feels more like the fantasy setting of the original game, and its story involves trying to locate four alchemists – one for each element – and stopping the demon Nemesis from gaining access to a fifth called the Quintessence. The acting and filming is way better this time around, and the pre-rendered scenes are even better than those in Myst and you can even pan around a full 360 degrees in some places.

Unfortunately, this is also one of the game’s weaknesses, as it creates a three-dimensionality that hasn’t quite worked out all the problems that later true 3D games would have to figure out, the biggest of which is how to help players to know where to look and what they need to do to progress.

There’s also the problem of some obvious production woes that forced the development team to cut out a lot of the puzzles and an entire third act for the game. And Zork Nemesis is such a joyless, dark and serious game that it also doesn’t really feel like Zork, which is known for its puckish sense of humor. Even so, it’s a better-made game than Return to Zork and worth looking into if you enjoy Myst-style adventure gaming.

The 1997 game Zork: Grand Inquisitor takes place between Zork Nemesis and Return to Zork and it takes things in the other direction by trying to be funny. You play as a Frobozz vacuum cleaner salesperson named “AFGNCAAP” which is an acronym for “Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person.”

One of your first tasks is to get a lamp, which becomes your guide and Dungeon Master narrator and is voiced by Michael McKean – you know, David St. Hubbins from This is Spinal Tap, character actor in many great movies and TV shows and more recently, Chuck McGill from Better Call Saul? He’s actually a perfect choice for this game in terms of tone and style, and while I can’t always say the game lands its attempts at humor, I do appreciate that it tries, because the plot this time is that the world is under the totalitarian rule of the Grand Inquisitor Yannick and magic is outlawed, and some humor is needed in the face of all the blatant fascism.

The characters are also a lot of fun this time around. There’s an Indiana Jones-style character named Antharia Jack who gets hauled off by jackbooted Frobozz thugs early in the game. He’s played by Dirk Benedict – the original Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica and Face from the A-Team! – and he’s really hamming it up in this game for comedic effect. There’s also a sarcastic enchantress named Y’Gael, a psychic named Lucy Flathead who beats Jack in a game of strip poker, a cowardly dragon named Griff and a fairly stupid troll named Brog who actually looks like a troll this time instead of a guy in bad costume. And you even get to play as some of these characters by entering time tunnels and visiting periods in the game’s past.

There are also a lot of references to Zork more broadly that will make series fans grin. Jack tells you he was involved in the Great Underground Adventure IV, which was a planned but unproduced Zork game. Some of the quest items you need are directly from other Zork games, including the skull of Yoruk and the fabled Coconut of Quendor. There’s a throwaway line about how adventurers steal everything that’s not nailed down, a major inside joke in the original Zork games. You’ll of course visit the boarded up house and also see key items from other Zork adventures around the world. And there’s even an Apple II-style computer you come across that seems to be running Planetfall, and you’ll see a similar screen pop up and detail your demise if you trigger a death sequence.

As you might be able to tell, Zork: Grand Inquisitor is a far better Zork game than its predecessors – it feels appropriately connected to the original games, strikes the same tone and also has plenty of references and allusions without feeling like it’s trying to recreate what came before it. And as an adventure game? Yeah, it’s actually pretty good! It’s definitely more like Myst and The 7^th Guest than a Sierra-style point and click adventure due to its arbitrary puzzles and theme park-ish emphasis on walking around pre-rendered environments looking for things to do, but it works. I’ll even give props to the Grand Inquisitor Yannick himself, played by the character actor Erick Avari – he’s a pompous and often amusing character who’s way more fun than the actual villain of Zork Nemesis.

If you’re going to play any of the FMV Zork games, play Grand Inquisitor. It was the least popular of the three in terms of sales, but it’s also the one you’ll have the most fun playing.

And speaking of the Zork games, another classic 1980s series got its own FMV adventure game in 1996. It’s called Nemesis: The Wizardry Adventure, though it’s not tied to any of the other Wizardry games canonically – it’s more like a Eye of the Beholder or Lands of Lore-style adventure RPG with a fixed character and light combat, though it’s cut closer to the cloth of Myst in terms of look and feel. Honestly, it’s a decent hybrid of the two, with great-looking dungeons and some nice outdoor areas made with a combination of pre-rendered sprites and pre-rendered backgrounds blended together, sort of like Donkey Kong Country but from a first person, three-dimensional point of view.

In 1996, 3D accelerator cards were still a fairly new idea and most computers couldn’t produce graphics like these on their own, so it was a neat trick, and Nemesis even has some places where your character is shown walking around in the world or where you see transitions between screens as you move. It’s not a consistent effect and it looks a bit clunky today, but it’s honestly a lot less dated than the mainline Wizardry games tend to be.

Myst inspired many other games that utilized pre-rendered backgrounds and rather passive adventuring, and I’m not even going to try to name them all. But one more we ought to cover is Starship Titanic, a much-hyped 1998 adventure game by The Digital Village, a developer in London co-founded by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy creator Douglas Adams along with his friend Robbie Stamp and a few other collaborators. And this game had the additional street cred of existing within the universe of Adams’s books since the Starship Titanic itself first appears in a footnote in the novel Life, The Universe and Everything and bears an early version of the Infinite Improbability Drive.

As we’ve discussed in previous episodes, Douglas Adams had a reputation for coming up with big ideas and not really seeing them through, and thankfully this time, he was supported with a writing team including his friend and previous adventure game collaborator Michael Bywater as well as D.A. Barham and Neil Richards.

Terry Jones also had some involvement behind the scenes because he wound up writing the novelization of the game and voicing the Parrot, a character whose voice will be immediately recognizable to any Monty Python fan, as will the voice of John Cleese, who provided the voice of the Bomb.

Having an entire team supported to seeing this game through helped, because it is ambitious, featuring a massive spaceship in which is it infinitely improbable that anything can possibly go wrong, and where of course things do go wrong immediately once the game starts and the ship crashes into your house. You’re taken aboard and find it’s filled with insane robots you can speak to via a text input parser.

So the first thing to mention about Starship Titanic is that it’s a really good-looking game, featuring an Art Deco aesthetic, neat-looking robots, great animations and smooth transitions between the various pre-rendered screens. It looks and feels a lot like a virtual reality game where your movement is confined to jumping between steps, and that’s actually a complement, since many Myst-style games don’t have any transitions at all. The sound is also quite good, with a nice score and some excellent voice acting, including Douglas Adams himself composing some of the music and playing a couple of roles: the Succ-U-Bus delivery system robot and the in-universe designer of the ship, Leovinus.

All of this sounds great, but the problem is that the game itself is not terribly entertaining. It’s witty, but not particularly funny, and the puzzles are not that inspired or interesting despite being insanely difficult in places. A puzzle near the end of the game requires you to use a photograph you’ve been holding since the beginning and some 3D glasses in the game’s box. One puzzle even requires you to look at the back of the game box, which was an irritating idea in Metal Gear Solid, which came out the same year, and which is similarly annoying here.

The text parser system doesn’t work as well as it ought to and it feels like a lot of effort went into giving the robots lines to spout but not into being able to have an actual dialogue with the player because the game’s chatbot technology – much more along the lines of an ELIZA bot than what we’d think of today - just wasn’t up to the task. Much of what was planned for the game also doesn’t seem to have made it into the final build. There are reportedly over 10,000 lines of dialogue in the game comprising over 16 hours of audio recordings for an adventure that you can beat in just a few hours.

There are also two endings, one in which the ship blows up because you accidentally armed a bomb to make that happen, and one in which it doesn’t and you get to become its owner under the rules of starship salvage. Apparently, a third “good” ending was planned and is in the game’s files, but didn’t make it in to the final version.

That all suggests to me what I think a lot of people feel about Starship Titanic – it looks great at first blush, but the experience is undercooked overall. And that is a very interesting sentiment given that the game was in development for 2 years with a full-sized team during a time when that was a very long and expensive development cycle. From all accounts, it wasn’t Douglas Adams dropping out this time like he had on Infocom’s Bureaucracy ten years prior; he stayed involved with the game and apparently cared a lot about it.

Rather, I think Douglas Adams and his team really, truly wanted it to be a groundbreaking game that just happened to be funny in a few places rather than a comedy game in the style of Myst. The ambitious design took precedence over the jokes, and even with some very funny people involved, it really does seem like a lot of the game’s ideas got cut to the bone so Digital Village would have something to ship before they ran out of money.

And so I’ll give Starship Titanic some credit for trying to go beyond what other adventure games were doing at the time. Unfortunately, it was considered a big flop and The Digital Village never made another game. They transitioned instead to a sort of Wikipedia-style project called H2G2 that the BBC took over in 2001, which happened to be the same year Douglas Adams passed away.

But one thing that did live on was the web forum for Starship Titanic, in which users spent years roleplaying on the Starship Titanic Construction Intranet as employees of Star-Struct Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Starlight Lines Corp. You’ve gotta love it when fans keep something alive, and one of the game’s developers, Yoz Grahame, did too – he kept the fictional employee website going long after the official Starship Titanic site shut down.

In the 1980s, arcades had a brief love affair with laserdisc games, which allowed gamers to enjoy state of the art interactive movie experiences featuring animation and full motion video. The most famous of these, of course, was the 1983 hit Dragon’s Lair, featuring lavish animation by Don Bluth. Several other laserdisc games came and went over the years, including a Dragon’s Lair sequel. Because the hardware was getting closer to being able to display fully animated graphics, personal computer users also got a third Dragon’s Lair game that translated that cel animation into fluidly animated pixel art designed for a fairly short and unsatisfying personal computer experience that felt more like a tech demo because the storage limitations of the day prevented the game from looking and feeling like a laserdisc title.

But as multimedia computers equipped with CD-ROM drives began to become more common in the early to mid 1990s, the opportunity to create games using full motion video was suddenly a reality. Myst, The 7^th Guest and The Journeyman Project were among the first games to show how FMV could be integrated into conventional gameplay, but there was also a lot of buzz around making actual interactive movies that could allow players to experience filmed scenes that would vary depending upon their choice. This design was particularly desirable because it would also work well on controller-driven console systems such as the Sega CD, 3DO and CD-i, broadening the playerbase.

A few of the early games released in this format came from a developer called Digital Pictures, who’d originally built their games to run on an unreleased console called the Hasbro Control-Vision, originally codenamed the NEMO. The idea of this console was that games would play on VHS tapes that allowed four video tracks to be played at a time. The game would allow players to switch between the different tracks to choose which parts of a story they’d want to view. The concept evolved from a murder mystery prototype into a horror game called Night Trap, which was filmed in 1987 and then designed for a planned release in 1989 along with another game called Sewer Shark that used the technology for a science fiction shooting gallery game. And both games wound up being shelved when Hasbro cancelled the release of the Control-Vision, later being retooled as launch titles for the North American launch of the Sega CD, which debuted in October,1992.

Night Trap is often referred to as the first interactive movie, but that’s a dubious distinction depending upon how you define that term. What you can say about Night Trap is that it was a lightning rod for controversy because its story involves a group of teenage girls spending a night in a wealthy family’s estate and being preyed upon by goofy vampires called Augers. One scene features a girl named Lisa in a skimpy nightgown being ambushed by some Augers hiding in the bathroom and then carted off screaming as they drain the blood from her neck with a vacuum-like device. While very tame by the standards of R-rated B-movies of the day, the suggestion that Night Trap might introduce young gamers to themes touching on sex and violence during a time when video games like Mortal Kombat were allowing players to commit fatalities created a national moral panic, directly leading to the creation of the ESRB and its ratings system.

I don’t want to waste a lot of breath talking about Night Trap; it’s a very dated game that isn’t much fun to play today beyond satisfying your curiosity. But it did introduce the world to the idea of the interactive movie adventure games that I do want to talk about, and we’ll start with a couple of subjects we’ve already mentioned a few different times in this series: ICOM Simulations, the makers of the MacVenture adventure game series, and Sherlock Holmes, who appeared in a full motion video series from 1991-1993 called Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective.

I’m not a huge fan of these games and I honestly prefer The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, which we covered in our last episode. The premise is essentially the same as the home video games that you’d see in the late 1980s for VCRs – you watch some video scenes to learn about the case, you select some different actions from a menu to view clues or talk to witnesses, and you try to solve the case with the fewest actions possible to maximize your score. There’s not a lot to do beyond watching video clips, though, and the games lose their replay value quickly because they’re not very interactive. The technology was definitely exciting in the early 1990s as multimedia gaming was flashy and new, but the thrill wore off quickly as better adventure games began integrating FMV scenes. Even so, I don’t want to make it sound like these games are bad; the production values are OK and the acting is basically the sort of television-quality stuff you’d see coming out of Britain in the 80s and 90s, but unless you’re really a big fan of Sherlock Holmes – and I am not – the appeal of the game is going to be in solving the three mysteries provided in each volume.

ICOM Simulations published a similar game in 1993 called Dracula Unleashed that also made it onto the Sega CD, no doubt to take advantage of the popularity of the 1992 feature film Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The game’s premise is that it’s a sequel to the novel when an American businessman named Alexander Morris is in London trying to learn about his brother Quincey’s death. He connects with his brother’s friend, Lord Arthur Holmwood, who invites him to join the secretive Hades Club. I won’t say much more, because the game’s actually good enough that you should play it and explore its story for yourself, but I will comment that what could have been a very cheesy and uninteresting game turns out to be one of the better full motion video adventures of the era.

1994 also saw the release of a cyberpunk full motion video game called Burn:Cycle, initially released for the CD-i console and eventually ported to personal computers the next year. Without question, Burn:Cycle is the best game on the CD-i and a legitimately fun and decent full motion video adventure game that also includes some action shooting gallery elements. The premise of the game is that you’re a data thief who’s picked up a neural virus infection that’s about to destroy your brain. You have to find a cure by navigating the game’s dystopian Blade Runner-style city and its cyberspace equivalent, the Televerse. The actors were filmed in front of a blue screen so that surreal computer graphics could appear behind them, and the game’s over-the-top 1990s style is cheesy and fun without undercutting the game’s story. People sometimes compare this game to the goofy 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic, but I actually think it’s closer to the aesthetic of the TV show Max Headroom.

And by the way, Johnny Mnemonic got its own FMV adventure game in 1995 which is like a basic cable production of the feature film starring different actors, including Julie Strain, the queen of B-movies, and Isaac Hayes, the musician and actor who was about to see his career get a second wind thanks to South Park, a comeback album and a revived interest in the theme to Shaft that same year. It’s not a good game by any means, but it is an interesting artifact of the era.

1994 also saw the release of Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? The Tale of Orpheo’s Curse, an adventure game in the style of The 7^th Guest based on the television show about a group of kids called the Midnight Society who tell ghost stories to each other. The game represents the ghost story you’re telling to the other kids, and that allows it to be a horror adventure without actually being that scary. Surprisingly, there’s not a ton of FMV, but rather, still photos featuring actors from the show along with a few video scenes here and there. As hokey as this game may seem, it’s not a bad adventure and it’s an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours, especially with kids who are interested in horror.

In 1996, Dreamworks Interactive released a similar game called Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland, a far more sophisticated full motion video horror experience featuring some Hollywood actors like Adam Wylie, Eric Lloyd, Isabella Rossellini and Jeff Goldblum. The game’s actually a sequel to the R.L. Stine Goosebumps young adult novel One Day at HorrorLand, and while it’s geared towards children, it’s got a few tense moments and some wonderfully creepy scenes and even some light combat to keep things interesting. A surprising amount of the game’s footage is filmed and then set over some impressive 3D rendered backgrounds that have smooth video transitions between scenes. Once again, this one’s a decent adventure that can be enjoyed in a couple of hours with your family.

There’s also a 1997 follow-up called Goosebumps: Attack of the Mutant, but it’s an action adventure hybrid produced in a weird animated cel-shaded style that isn’t too impressive today, and the game plays like a first person shooter in many places where you beat up enemies with your trusty rake or other weapons like rayguns or a paintball cannon. I personally find this game to be nightmare fuel due to its off-putting animation style and odd perspective where the characters are constantly looking down at you like you’re a kid, but it does at least have Adam West in it playing a hero named The Galloping Gazelle and Jim Belushi as the Masked Mutant.

A few other FMV games worth mentioning from the mid-1990s are the awkwardly named 1994 Riverhill Soft game J.B. Harold: Blue Chicago Blues, which continues the J.B. Harold Murder Club series, and the even more awkwardly-named Interworks and Grolier Electronic Publishing game SFPD Homicide / Case File: The Body in the Bay. Both of these games are procedurals with investigation elements and a mixture of video footage and stills, and they’re a decent time if you like detective-style games.

But let me close out our discussion of this style of game with two that were published by Take Two Interactive: Ripper and Black Dahila.

Ripper came out in 1996 and it’s a cyberpunk adventure set in a dystopian New York City in the year 2040, and you know this game has some juice because its introductory cinematic is set to the classic rock song “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. It also stars Christopher Walken as Detective Vincent Magnotta, who sets the tone in one of the early scenes that this is going to be a game that’s both serious, full of grown-up language and, at times, a little off-kilter.

You play as a reporter named Jake Quinlan who’s investigating the Ripper murders, which are brutal and mysterious, but which he discovers have a connection to a role-playing video game based on Jack the Ripper.

Ripper is surprisingly good for such an oddball premise, and while it’s a tad cheesy – especially when you enter the game’s take on cyberspace – the graphics are good, the acting is decent and the story is intriguing with some interesting twists and turns. It’s also surprisingly lengthy for an FMV game, spanning 6 CD-ROM discs, requiring many hours to get through and offering a few challenging puzzles and action sequences to pad things out.

Take Two’s 1998 follow-up Black Dahlia takes place in the 1940s and is based on an actual historical event that took place in California involving the mysterious and unsolved murder of a woman named Elizabeth Short, who received the nickname “the Black Dahlia” after she died. The game doesn’t follow the actual story too closely, which is just as well – most of what was reported back in the day was speculative and intended to sell newspapers. The game also involves investigations into a real-life historical killer who perpetrated the Cleveland Torso Murders before World War II and ties this all together into a wild plot involving Nazis and the occult.

I’ll mention up front that Black Dahlia is a very good adventure game, often regarded as perhaps the last great FMV game of the era and also one of the last great adventures in general before the genre went dormant.

But man, is this game dark. It begins as a standard detective story in Cleveland, but there’s a time jump about halfway through the game that takes you into the aftermath of World War II in Germany, where you pick up the trail of the case and find a mystical gemstone called the Black Dahlia and you uncover a trail leading to Elizabeth Short. The game doesn’t allow you to change history and save her – though you definitely try! – but it does provide an explanation for her murder, and man, does it result in one incredibly climactic ending.

Black Dahlia is tremendously impressive as a work of interactive fiction. It’s well-written, has some excellent cinematography and acting, makes great use of its 1940s setting – particularly once you get to Hollywood in the latter half of the game - and even has some impressive props, costumes and digital sets that fit the period appropriately. The puzzles feel fairly connected to the detective story and aren’t nearly as arbitrary as some of those in other FMV games, and the entire adventure has an amazingly tense atmosphere thanks to its unsettling score and gradual cat and mouse dynamic that evolves with the game’s psychopathic chief villain. When you have famous Hollywood actors like Dennis Hopper and Teri Garr in a game like this and they don’t manage to steal every scene they’re in, you know you have something special. And this game has dozens of actors in it who do a great job of playing their roles.

It’s not easy to play Black Dahlia today because it’s stuck in copyright hell along with Ripper and Take Two’s hard to recommend 1994 FMV adventure Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, but it’s definitely worth tracking down and playing through. It’s even longer than Ripper and stretched across 8 CD-ROM discs, but you’ll never forget it once you finish it. Just make sure you have a walkthrough handy – some of those puzzles are brutal!

We’ve talked about some great games in this episode, but I’ve saved some of the best for last. I’ve mentioned Legend Entertainment’s Mission Critical and Access Software’s Tex Murphy FMV adventures in previous episodes, but now we’re going to finally talk through them a little bit, and I’m hopeful that once you hear about them, you’ll be excited to give them a try if you haven’t already.

Mission Critical is a full motion video science fiction game in the style of Star Trek, right down to the fact that Michael Dorn, who played Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation, is one of the actors in the game. But the game’s story is definitely different from anything the Enterprise crew faced – you are the lone surviving crewman on an interstellar ship called the Lexington that was intended to escort a scientific vessel to investigate a mysterious alien artifact on the planet Persephone. Your faction, the Alliance Interstellar Space Operations Command, represents a variety of outer space colonies and a few allied nations on Earth and needs to retrieve this artifact to have a chance to fight back against the oppressive United Nations. And yes, in the 22^nd century, the United Nations is a totalitarian Terran society that’s up to no good.

You have to bring the ship back online, reconnect with the Admiral in command and then complete the mission, which involves fighting off pursuing forces with your ship’s drones, piloting a lander to the surface and locating the alien artifact. And this latter part is where the game gets a little jarring because the first two thirds of the game takes place in pre-rendered settings and lots of full motion video sequences, but once you arrive on Persephone, some of the artwork is illustrated instead. I’m guessing Legend Entertainment ran out of time or money and had to insert some concept art to ship the game.

But don’t let that stop you from trying it out. Mission Critical is a very smart game with a good story, solid puzzles that suit the gameplay and decent acting from both the onscreen actors and the voice actors. The game was created and written by Mike Verdu, the Legend Entertainment co-founder who also designed Frederik Pohl’s Gateway and its sequel, and it’s serious science fiction stuff with a high concept story, a realistic understanding of how interstellar combat would actually work and even a plausible rationale for a time loop that impacts the latter part of the game. My only real complaint is that there’s a long and very detailed info dump that occurs once you make contact with the beings guarding the artifact, and it goes on for nearly a half-hour if you sit and listen to the whole thing. The game does very little to make this palatable, mostly showing an image of a sort of energy ball and alternating between male and female voices speaking in monotone. It’s one hiccup in an otherwise intriguing and well-made adventure game.

Speaking of science fiction you might wonder if Star Wars and Star Trek had any FMV adventure games that made use of the film and television production happening in the late 1990s, and the answer is “yes, but…”. For Star Wars, there was Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire, a game notable for getting Lucasfilm to dust off some of its old props and costumes and shoot some brand new scenes just for the game. But it’s a rail shooter, not an adventure game. Likewise, the Star Wars: Dark Forces II - Jedi Knight has some full motion video and pre-rendered sequences, but it’s a first person shooter.

Star Trek, on the other hand, had the 1996 interactive movie Star Trek: Borg, starring John de Lancie hamming it up as Q. It’s actually a fun and interesting interactive film that’s well-directed and which feels authentic to the Star Trek shows that were on TV in the mid-90s.

1996 also saw the release of Star Trek: Klingon, an immersive language lesson and voyage into Klingon culture which was directed by Jonathan Frakes, best known for playing Commander William T. Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The game takes place on the holodeck with the Klingon Gowron guiding you through things, and it’s amazingly over the top with some of the greatest scenery chewing you’ll ever seen from a costumed cast. The box also included an audiobook CD read by Michael Dorn in a 24-minute lesson called Power Klingon that even had a program using the Dragon Systems speech recognition software to help users practice speaking in the Klingon language.

Another example of Hollywood trying to get into the FMV adventure genre include the 1996 Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair, in which you learn a little bit about how movies are made and get to do things like make your own movie poster, hear advice from your production staff, spend time in the editing bay and add sound effects. You even get to splice together your own film from footage starring celebrities like Quentin Tarantino, Jennifer Anniston and Penn & Teller. It’s fun stuff and it will actually teach you a bit about how things work behind the scenes on a movie production.

And then there was Amazing Media’s run of FMV games starting with 1994’s Wyatt Earp’s Old West, which is more of an edutainment style game to follow some of their other games like Space Shuttle, Capitol Hill and Maniac Sports, and their amazingly goofy movie monster-style games, 1995’s Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster, which stars Tim Curry as Dr. Frankenstein, and 1996’s Mummy: Tomb of the Pharaoh, which has no connection to the 1999 feature film, but which does star Malcolm McDowell really giving it his all as the game’s chief villain. This is the same year he returned to star as Admiral Tolwyn in Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, by the way, so he must have really been enjoying being in video games at the time.

But you know who else seems to have really enjoyed being in video games? Chris Jones, the face of Access Software’s Tex Murphy and also one of the chief designers behind Under a Killing Moon, a 1994 CD-ROM adventure game set in a sort of Blade Runner-ish dystopian future, but with its own sort of retro-future hard-boiled detective style that definitely focuses on delivering a great adventure gaming experience every bit as good as anything Sierra or LucasArts created.

This series was super popular in the 1990s among multimedia fans, and it has some pretty amazing production values, including the voice of James Earl Jones as the narrator known as the Great P.I. of the Universe, Margot Kidder from the Superman movies as the Bartender, television and film actor Brian Keith as the Colonel and the Lakota actor, musician and activist Russell Means as Chameleon. But these celebrities support a frankly incredible cast of character actors who go out of their way to bring the world to life, and that’s all the more impressive when you recognize that they were shot against a blue screen with almost all of the backgrounds and props being added in digitally with bitmapped renders.

A lot of movies weren’t even doing this back in 1994, so it’s a very striking look, especially since the game’s rooms and streets are portrayed in 3D and you can walk around them. Unlike the pre-rendered scenes in many other FMV adventure games, the environments are actually run in a custom engine that looks surprisingly good for an era in which Doom was still considered state of the art. Tex can also jump in his car and travel around Old San Francisco, or what’s left of it following an apocalyptic event during World War III. This game definitely required a beast of a multimedia machine to run it well in 1994, and the sequels also stayed pretty close to the cutting edge as well.

As the detective and part-time dance instructor Tex Murphy, you mainly gather clues through items and dialogue. Some puzzles also require you to reassemble shredded documents or locate keys to open doors. As you explore, you’ll often come across characters you can click on to trigger full motion video sequences, and since many of them are mutants, there are a lot of crazy costumes and accents to keep the characters interesting.

The plot of the game itself is actually the least interesting thing about Under a Killing Moon –if you find yourself invested in the story about a missing statue and an evil cult trying to wipe out mutant life and a space colony called the Moon Child, you’re a better player than me. What I find intriguing about the game is its atmosphere; the world of Under a Killing Moon feels very detailed and lived-in, and it’s a lot of fun to explore and just chop it up with some of the game’s many characters. Tex’s personal problems are a lot more interesting to solve than the case itself, and the game’s puzzles do a good job of making you feel like a detective who’s stringing together trail of cryptic clues in a situation where it’s really not clear what Tex has gotten himself into.

The next game in the series, 1996’s The Pandora Directive, reuses a lot of the technology, locations and characters from Under a Killing Moon, but it’s a longer and more impressive experience that includes a more sophisticated story with a branching plot and different attitudes Tex can adopt that are identified in the game through a metaphor known as Mission Street, Lombard Street and Boulevard of Broken Dreams – basically, the high road, the typical Tex middle road and selfish jerk road. The game has eight endings, six of which are unique and four of which are reserved for the Boulevard of Broken Dreams path, and the game changes substantially in some places based on the path you take. It’s a really clever way to get you to think about Tex’s actions and encourage a little bit of role-playing to make the story feel more personal.

Also, one of the endings has Tex quit being a P.I. and become a sad clown. You’ve gotta love it.

As in Under a Killing Moon, the overarching story of The Pandora Directive is probably the least interesting thing about it – this game’s twisty-turny plot is constantly sending Tex in different directions and encouraging you to make choices that will ultimately shape his character and his love life. The story’s ultimately about tracking down an alien spaceship connected to the Roswell incident in 1947 as well as the NSA’s attempts to suppress Tex and the people involved in the case from finding it.

The gameplay also offers an easier Entertainment Mode and a more fulfilling Game Players mode to allow players to determine whether or not they want to just play through the story or actually solve the puzzles. I love that it offers this because it gives the game some additional replay value for those who want to experience the story first and then go back and challenge themselves to get all the points and see all the endings.

The next game in the series, 1998’s Tex Murphy: Overseer, is a remake of the 1989 point and click game Mean Streets and essentially has Tex retelling the story of that game, but with some differences here and there. It’s a fun way to see the original game rendered in the new FMV style and also to look back in time at New San Francisco when Tex had a nice office and took a job from his first client, Sylvia Linsky, who’d eventually become his wife and then ex-wife.

Overseer is not nearly as groundbreaking as The Pandora Directive and it was actually intended to be the stopgap between that game and a sequel called Trance that Access Software never published. And actually, according to series co-creator Aaron Conners, that might have even expanded out into three games called Chance, Polarity and Trance. Unfortunately, Overseer became the last Tex Murphy game for the next decade and a half, and even worse, it ended on a cliffhanger.

As adventure games go, Overseer is a fine experience. It’s plenty of fun if you’re invested in the world and the characters of the previous two games, but it’s also a big letdown after the incredible experience The Pandora Directive provides. It’s also the game with the best camera work, visual effects, acting and detective story, playing much more like a full-on FMV game than a 3D game with FMV sequences. As such, I definitely recommend it, and it’s a fine replacement for Mean Streets.

As I mentioned, Tex Murphy fans had a long wait for another game. Several Access Software folks, including Chris Jones and Aaron Conners, eventually came back together under a new development studio called Big Finish Games and bought back the rights to the Tex Murphy series. They started teasing a new game called “Project Fedora” and eventually posted it up on Kickstarter in 2012, receiving enough backing to develop the concept into a 2014 game called Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure that continued the story of Overseer with Chris Jones once again stepping into the role of Tex.

Unfortunately, there was such a gap between this game and the previous ones that the plot had to be advanced seven years and put Tex into a sort of stranger in a strange land storyline where he’s essentially an amnesiac trying to figure out what happened but also getting caught up in a new web of intrigue. Many of the actors from the previous games return to play characters, and Kevin Murphy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax plays your digital assistant Smart Alex. The new high-quality video and more modern 3D engine make the experience of returning to Old San Francisco a lot of fun, and I’d suggest this game, like Overseer, is best-appreciated by those who are really invested in the storyline of the characters. Like The Pandora Directive, there are some branching plotlines to explore, and the game’s made with a lot of obvious love for both the 1990s games and the fandom.

Thankfully, it’s a good stopping point for the story, and also for our look at Tex Murphy! It doesn’t look like we’ll get any more Tex games soon, but for those who want more story, Aaron Conners has written three novelizations and two follow-up novels to pick up after Tesla Effect. And hey, there’s also a gamebook called Tex Murphy and the Steakhouse Stakeout: An Interactive Adventure for those who really can’t get enough.

We’ve made it through the FMV era, but once again, we’ve barely scratched the surface. I have a long list of lesser-known games in the style of the ones we’ve been talking about I’d love to delve into, but which I think you’ll have much more fun exploring on your own. So head to greatestgames.substack.com and look at the show script for this episode to find those recommendations at the end, along with links to their MobyGames pages so you can learn more.

We’ve still got to cover 3D games, interesting offshoots of the genre and talk about LucasArt’s evolution into multimedia and 3D, so we’ll cover that in the next episode! I’m talking about games like Chronomaster, The Longest Journey, Bioforge, The Last Express, The Neverhood, Sanitarium, Twinsen’s Odyssey, VooDoo Kid, Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island.

I also realize a lot of our conversation has centered on the English-speaking world, and that’s because I have a huge blind spot for Japanese adventure games since I don’t speak or read the language. Fortunately, some of the best Japanese adventures got ported over to consoles and translated into English, so we can talk about them along with other adventure games that are console-exclusive!

So in our following episode, we’re going to flip over to consoles and handhelds to talk about games like Policenauts, Nightshade, The Space Adventure, Night Trap, Mansion of Hidden Souls, D, Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, Blazing Dragons, Scooby-Doo Mystery, Policenauts, Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure, Swagman, Steins;Gate, Clannad and Moon. And, if we have time, we may even delve into the incredible Sakura Taisen series, find a Zero Escape sort of dilemma or spend some time righting wrongs in the Turnabout Courtroom with an Ace Attorney on the rise!

Then we’ll finally close by touching on the 21^st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream. I honestly don’t know how we’re going to fit it all in!

If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.

And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!

I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRY

Before I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.

This week, I’m recommending Dunk Dunk by Playtonic Friends and published by Badgehammer Limited. It’s a strange fusion of NBA Jam and competitive indie games like Nidhogg 2 where you can create your own characters from different body parts, and while it might not look like much at first, this game truly has the juice to be a great local co-op or competitive experience.

The basic idea of the game is that you’re playing a 2D platformer take on basketball with either 1v1 or 2v2 match-ups. Your characters have really long arms you can swing around to dunk, but they can also transform into long platforms to block other players from getting the ball into the goal. And while you can also shoot the ball, it’s very easy for other players to steal it, encouraging both sides to try to keep possession as long as possible and make that dunk.

The game has a surprising amount of customization options and modifiers to keep things fresh, and it’s super easy to pick up and play. I’m honestly surprised it’s not getting more attention, because it’s a tremendously fun and provides an excellent couch co-op experience!

I got Dunk Dunk for a couple of bucks in a game bundle, but even at its full asking price of $7, it’s a great deal and even includes a crossover with The Plucky Squire as well as other indie games like Demon Turf. If you like those games, you’ll like this one too!

A List of Adventures I didn’t cover!

Each of the following adventure games is interesting for some reason. I won’t defend them all as being great, but give them a shot - you may find a new game you absolutely love! (Listed by year, then alphabetical)

• Bloodnet (1993) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1036/bloodnet/)

• Gadget: Invention, Travel & Adventure (1993) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/3741/gadget-invention-travel-adventure/)

• The Labyrinth of Time (1993) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2441/the-labyrinth-of-time/)

• The Dark Eye (1995) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1782/the-dark-eye/)

• Lost Eden (1995) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1054/lost-eden/)

• Psychic Detective (1995) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/3503/psychic-detective/)

• Ripley’s Believe It or Not!: The Riddle of Master Lu (1995) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1996/ripleys-believe-it-or-not-the-riddle-of-master-lu/)

• DogDay (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/19244/dogday/)

• Kingdom II: Shadoan (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/6945/kingdom-ii-shadoan/)

• Noir: A Shadowy Thriller (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/4509/noir-a-shadowy-thriller/)

• Private Eye (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/7117/private-eye/)

• Timelapse (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2172/timelapse/)

• Titanic: Adventure Out of Time (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2892/titanic-adventure-out-of-time/)

• Atlantis: The Lost Tales, Beyond Atlantis, Beyond Atlantis II (1997, 1999, 2001) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/158187/atlantis-trilogy/)

• Obsidian (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1564/obsidian/)

• Pilgrim: Faith as a Weapon (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2436/pilgrim-faith-as-a-weapon/)

• Celtica (1998) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2421/celtica/)

• Of Light and Darkness: The Prophecy (1998) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2820/of-light-and-darkness-the-prophecy/)

• Ring: The Legend of the Nibelungen (1998) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/3128/ring-the-legend-of-the-nibelungen/)

• Zero Zone (1998) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/4886/zero-zone/)

• Seven Games of the Soul (1999) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1393/seven-games-of-the-soul/)

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

RELEASE DATE: 1991

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Naxat

BEST VERSIONS: PC Engine

One of my rules for this series is that I’ll only include games exclusive to Japan if they are playable in English or if they have since been released in North America and/or Europe. Unfortunately, this means a lot of PC Engine games get left off my list because they don’t meet either criteria, but Coryoon: Child of Dragon is an exception. The only Japanese is embedded in the logo, which is itself in English, and all of the stages and in-game text (even the credits!) are also in English. I’m a little baffled as to why this game never made it overseas, to be honest, because it’s not only quite a good-looking shoot ‘em up, but also one of the more accessible genre entries I’ve come across on the PC Engine. That it was made by many of the same team members who created the Bonk/PC Genjin spinoff Air Zonk makes a lot of sense, but whereas that game at least got a North American release, Coryoon remains obscure today.

The premise of the game is about as simple as it gets - a beautiful blonde human princess is turned into a little girl by an evil magical suit of armor and her pet dragon, Coryoon goes off on an adventure to revert things back to normal. It’s a low-stakes affair that feels like it was probably created with young children in mind. That makes sense because Coryoon is a fairly easy shoot ‘em up with a generous point system that gives you lots of lives and so many opportunities to pick up power-ups that you will rarely have to stay in a powered-down state for more than a few seconds. The only way to die is to take a hit in your weakened state, and you jump right back into the action. While you’re limited to nine lives at a time, every defeated enemy drops fruit that ratchets up your points and brings your life total quickly back up.

As such, it’s a wonderful entry point into a genre known for being brutally tough, but even as a fairly easy title, it still delivers a little bit of challenge where it counts with some awesome and fairly unique boss encounters.

Coryoon himself is a winged baby dragon with giant eyes, and he can even become that much cuter by picking up a power-up that shrinks him down in size, making it even easier to dodge enemies and their attacks. The game’s weapons are delivered by storks and are color-coded: red for fire, blue for water and yellow for lightning. Even better, the power-ups change colors so you can select which one you want at any given moment. Each power can be leveled up by collecting two or more of the same color, and they each serve a purpose: fire is a powerful forward attack that sustains damage, water cuts through everything ahead of you and lightning is your spread attack, eventually going in every direction instead of just forward. You can also charge up a powerful fireball by letting go of the button and pressing it once Coryoon has a mouthful of energy, provided that he’s full size.

Beyond shrinking down, Coryoon can also pick up power-ups resembling playing card suits (clubs, spades, hearts and diamonds) that can give you additional help like fairies that circle like a shield, a screen-clearing bomb and a magnet that attracts fruit when the second button is held down. Coryoon can also find miniature dragons who will aid him in different ways depending on their color – the blue ones home in on enemies and destroy them, the red ones fire standard shots and the yellow ones deploy thunderbolts in a spreadshot pattern.

The game’s seven levels are not particularly challenging – there’s rarely an environmental hazard beyond some things like beehives, clapping hands, crystals, stone totems or walking trees, and the biggest challenge at times can be understanding what’s happening onscreen because you’re firing so many shots, and enemies are dropping so much fruit, that the game can be a bit visually overwhelming. When you add in the absolutely gorgeous parallax scrolling backgrounds, bright use of color and the large and detailed cartoonish enemy sprites, you’ve got an amazing-looking game that feels like a sugar rush, especially once you add in the excellent (and surprisingly chill) soundtrack.

But Coryoon does up the intensity when you reach the bosses. Mid-bosses are generally pretty simple and receive a minor background change with some slightly more dramatic music, and they’re nicely varied, including things like crabs, an adorable stegosaurus, a spiky sea urchin and an evil comet that shoots ice balls at you.

But you know things are really going to get wild when you reach a portion of the stage where storm clouds form and the music kicks up the speed to let you know you’re about to fight someone who means business.

The boss battles always involve at least two phases where the boss will change behavior. The first boss encounter involves a unicorn and Pegasus duo who combine into a single creature for their second phase. The second involves a flying lobster bearing a United States Air Force tattoo who first attacks with his claw before ditching it and shooting eye lasers at you. A snake-tailed griffin will first pelt you with pellets and whirlwinds before deploying a circular shield and charging at you aggressively. The head of a horned serpent will roll around with a fire shield before uncoiling its whole body and chasing you around the screen, daring you to dodge its segments. And a phoenix-like hawk with a magic tail will pelt you with feathers before it starts shooting bouncing balls and launching more serious homing missiles at you. The game’s penultimate boss also really intrigues me because it’s a horned flying sea turtle with quartz crystals poking out of its back that function like surface to air rockets.

When you finally battle the evil suit of armor as a seemingly final boss – really, just the shoulder pads, helmet and gauntlets – the game pulls Coryoon into a boss rush mode where you get to battle everything again. But this time, you also get to fight a trio of silver clones of yourself before they fuse into one giant, angry-eyed (but still adorable) silver dragon for you to take down. Why defeating him breaks the princess’s curse is never explained, but Coryoon rushes back to her for a warm embrace all the same as the game concludes.

It all makes for a wonderful experience that’s just the right length and level of difficulty for a cute ‘em up shooter, and the only downside to Coryoon: Child of Dragon is that it’s never been released outside of Japan; playing it without a PC Engine and HuCard requires emulation if you want to experience it. But it’s definitely worth the effort!

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

RELEASE DATE: 1990 and 1992

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Technosoft / Sega

BEST VERSIONS: Genesis / Mega Drive

As is so often the case with this series, I fear shoot ‘em up fans are going to balk at my inclusion of two of Technosoft’s greatest shmups in this section because anyone who knows the genre and the Genesis/Mega Drive platform knows that the Thunder Force games are absolutely the pinnacle of console scrolling shooters. Both games are so excellent that any genre fan worth his or her salt has not only played them, but worshipped at their altar because they are really, truly that good at what they do.

But if you’re a typical gamer whose familiarity with shoot ‘em ups is confined to the most popular arcade series like Gradius, R-Type, Raiden, Xevious, Galaga and Space Invaders, you’ve probably not only never heard of these two games but might not have even realized that they’re related. After all, Thunder Force IV was released in North America under the very odd (and incorrectly spelled) Lightening Force: Quest for the Darkstar. And it’s very possible many players missed out on Thunder Force III by writing it off as a “more of the same sequel” to the Genesis/Mega Drive launch title Thunder Force II. They may have also thought it was just another version of the SNES’s related title Thunder Spirits, which was actually a port of an inferior arcade conversion of Thunder Force III.

So, let’s just concede that whether you’re casually interested in shoot ‘em ups or if you’re a devotee of the genre, Thunder Force III and its sequel are games you definitely must play if you want to have any credibility with your fellow fans. I’ll do my part to spread the good word here that these are two games that deserve recognition but don’t get talked about nearly enough by modern gamers if you promise to do your part and actually experience them.

And that journey should start with Thunder Force III, which was Technosoft’s first pure shoot ‘em up developed specifically for the Sega Genesis after adapting their Sharp X68000 game Thunder Force II to the console in 1989 and also releasing the amazing real-time strategy game Herzog Zwei, both of which we covered in our previous volume. The game begins by allowing you to select one of five different levels and then sets you loose in a starship called Styx that very quickly acquires power-ups and weapons systems that it can change on the fly. In addition to your standard twin cannon and backfire modes, you can get a laser beam to improve your twin shot, a lancer to improve your backfire, a wave weapon to fire in front of you, missiles that crawl along the top and bottom areas of the screen and homing orbs that seek out foes.

But the most useful power-up is a spinning set of satellites called claws that double your standard firepower but also enhance the other weapons systems you can collect. With the claw equipped, your already fast-firing weapons get a serious upgrade and make the Styx a formidable force as your ship fills the screen with powerful projectiles. And because the game makes it to easy for your ship to become devastating, it of course takes the opportunity to assault you with waves of fast-moving enemies from all sides of the screen, often forcing you to think fast and vary your own speed and position to deal with them. In a lesser shooter, this would mean instant death, but Thunder Force III makes your ship quite maneuverable and able to respond to threats that pop up out of nowhere or quickly chase you to the back of the screen.

The game also likes to throw environmental challenges your way, sometimes shifting the action vertically or even putting you in positions where the screen has to scroll backwards to get you moving again. Every stage is quite distinctive and offers a different sort of environment to experience, such as dodging falling rocks in an underground cave, a battle above the mountains in the clouds, forging a blazing path through an inferno, fighting through tight undersea passages or traversing a vine-covered forest. The final three missions send you after the enemy Orn empire to take on a giant battlecruiser from the outside and then the inside as you progress towards the core. Making it through the game isn’t easy, but it is rewarding as a surprisingly lengthy scrolling text ending plays and sends the Styx’s two pilots, Jean and Shely, back home to the people they love. A lot of the text is incredible nonsense, but it does include lines like “And a peaceful time came soon. It might be for a short time. Human beings, think about what you have done.”

And then Thunder Force IV ups the ante in every way possible and adds a cherry on top by giving you a laser sword halfway through the game.

The story of the North American version of Thunder Force IV, under the title Lightening Force: Quest for the Darkstar, is completely inconsequential. Basically, the bad guys from the previous game have some allies who have come into the possession of a battle computer that’s going to allow them to take over the galaxy, and it’s up to a new team of pilots in the shiny new Rynex fighter to stop them. (Those who care about the lore should really check out the later Saturn and PlayStation sequel Thunder Force V, which not only significantly rewrites the story of all of the previous games, but also brings the battle to Earth in the 22^nd century.)

The game begins by once again allowing the player to select the order of the first few levels and immediately gets to some impressive stuff that really pushes the limits of the console hardware. One level is a desert with a sandstorm blowing by and ground units that can drop from ornithopter-like enemies and bury themselves in the shifting sands below. Another takes you across (and eventually into) a sea surrounded by craggy cliffs where a beast of an enemy ship arises before the boss detaches and battles you over the waters. And yet another takes you through an orbital space battle where you dodge formations of larger ships and avoid blasts meant for them as you chase down a powerful opponent.

And that’s just the game getting started, because once those relatively simple stages are complete, there are still six more to go. And the fifth sets you up for a massive space battle where the formidable boss gets away. Fortunately, some friendly ships arrive to power up your claw satellite system and also to equip you with a powerful lightning sword that will charge up whenever you’re not shooting. The game kicks into overdrive at this point, providing some levels that are a little more standard shoot ‘em up fare as you fly through an ice level, a fire level and some biomechanical ruins on your way to take down the enemy battle computer. But the game makes up for its more conventional design in this half with some excellent level design, fun boss battles and a tremendously difficult final showdown with that enemy that escaped earlier in the game.

The mechanics for Thunder Force IV are quite similar to those in the prior game, but the weapons systems have been overhauled a bit to include some more impressive – and versatile – offensive measures, including a throwing star-like blade beam, improved homing missiles, a rear-facing rail gun and an exploding cloud of bombs. As in the third game, players can control the speed of their ship by pressing a button to change the engine strength, and the result is a fast-moving but highly controllable shoot ‘em up where your ship fills the screen with highly destructive power that’s customizable on the fly.

The question of which game is better often arises when discussing the Thunder Force series, but I feel it’s a silly debate because both Thunder Force III and Thunder Force IV are incredible and deserve to be experienced in tandem. Each is very easy to play today on modern hardware through the Nintendo Switch; Thunder Force III is part of the Nintendo Switch Online Sega Genesis collection, and Lightening Force: Quest for the Darkstar can be purchased as a standalone game through the Sega Ages collection (which also boasts the inferior Thunder Force AC). This is a much better way to play the games than purchasing the original cartridges, which have unfortunately become quite pricey on the collector’s market.

Thunder Force V and the Japan-only Thunder ForceVI, while definitely not as revelatory or classic as III and IV, are also worthwhile if you can find them, and we’ll certainly cover them in later volumes.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

We’re going to talk about all sorts of point and click adventure games from the 1990s that weren’t published by Sierra, including The Legend of Kyrandia, Beneath a Steel Sky, Dark Seed, Call of Cthulhu, Dune, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, Beavis and Butthead and of course, Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream!

I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed!

One name you haven’t heard much about since we left LucasArts a few episodes ago is Ron Gilbert, and you might wonder what he was up to after leaving LucasArts following Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. And the answer is, “making dozens of games with his colleague Shelley Day,” another established game developer who’d worked at LucasArts. Together, they’d found Humongous Entertainment and make games about characters like Putt-Putt, Fatty Bear, Freddi Fish and Pajama Sam, with many of these point and click adventures utilizing the SCUMM engine.

But because these games are for little kids, I don’t feel a lot of need to go into detail about them. Suffice it to say Ron Gilbert did eventually return to modern adventure games and we’ll cover him in later episodes.

And as for Shelley Day… well, that’s a sad story, and you look her up in the show notes if you want to see why she and Gilbert parted ways.

But I bring up Ron Gilbert because he’s one of the few adventure game creators who really stayed active in the 1990s working on point and click adventure games and not trying to evolve things into 3D or to chase after trends like pre-rendered artwork or controller-friendly mechanics. He’s also one of the people who most influenced the style of point and click adventure games by not only articulating a philosophy he largely followed, but also by showing people how it could be done with the first two Monkey Island games.

And as we’ve already discussed with games like Simon the Sorcerer and Discworld, that Monkey Island style was pretty prevalent throughout the 1990s, especially with Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle and some of the less aggressive Sierra games. But not everyone was copying that style, and one developer that certainly tried to do its own thing was Cryo Interactive, a French developer founded by several folks from ERE Informatique. While ERE was bombastic and included the intergalactic logo for Exxos in its branding, Cryo adopted the face of a female android in a sleep pod, first seen in the French-only puzzle game Extase, based on a minigame called “Brain Bowler” in ERE’s truly odd 1989 outer space Olympiad, Purple Saturn Day.

Cryo’s next project was an adventure game based on Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel, Dune, in 1992, but which also drew heavy visual inspiration from the 1984 David Lynch feature film adaptation, even using the film’s logo and a production still of Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides in a stillsuit on the cover of several editions of the North American release. According to the credit, MacLachlan’s appearance was licensed for the game, probably to help enhance its marketability.

Within the game, some characters resemble the film’s actors. Feyd-Rautha Harkonen still closely resembles Sting, for example, and Lady Jessica looks a lot like Francesca Annis. Virgina Maden’s Princess Irulan also shows up in footage from the film to narrate the story in the Sega CD version. Other characters, however, like Thufir Hawat, Baron Harkonen and Duncan Idaho, look so different they’re not remotely recognizable.

Dune is a fascinating point and click adventure because it takes place from the first person perspective as you control Paul Atreides visiting various sites on the planet of Arrakis, but it also transforms into a strategy game about midway through once the Harkonens kill Duke Leto and you have to work to evict them from strongholds.

Throughout the game, the Fremen recognize you as Muad’Dib and pledge their loyalty to you as you visit their sietches, and a lot of the political and social dynamics of the book and film are relaxed to make the adventure simpler and more focused. But you still get to fly around in ornithopters, ride sandworms and raise armies… as well as fall in love with Chani, whose fate is a little happier in this telling than the source material where she’s only permitted to be Paul’s concubine when he seizes the Imperial throne.

Cryo’s work on the game, however, was famously troubled due to a number of issues going on behind the scenes, and as they were working on their Dune game, an American developer called Westwood Studios was building one of its own, a real-time strategy base-building and resource-gathering game that would come out the same year as Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty. It’s one of my favorite games of all time, by the way, and the direct inspiration for Blizzard’s Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Westwood’s own Command & Conquer series. But we’ll talk about those games another time.

As for Westwood, we’ll come back to them in a few minutes, because they, too, were building adventure games in the 1990s.

But I want to touch on a few other games Cryo released in the 1990s that were also adventure games, including their 1992 adventure KGB, which has a reputation for being one of the most difficult graphical adventure games ever made, and yet which is still well-regarded as being a legitimately good game. And by the way, there is a 1993 CD-ROM re-release called Conspiracy that adds in some clips where Donald Sutherland plays the main character’s deceased father, but these scenes really just provide some vague advice and don’t add much to the game.

The premise of KGB is that the Soviet Union is days away from collapsing in 1991 and you are an officer named Captain Maksim Mikhailovich Rukov, or either Maks or Rukov for short, who’s joined the KGB’s Department P and who has to investigate some problems within the KGB that eventually lead to an assassination plot to murder Mikhal Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the USSR.

I’m not sure exactly how historically accurate the game actually is, but in real life, there was a failed coup attempt in August of 1991 that involved the KGB and the State Committee on the State of Emergency, more popularly known as the “Gang of Eight,” who opposed Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost, which meant restructuring and transparency.

KGB is all about spycraft and catching some of the slipperiest people you’ll ever see in an adventure game through a variety of methods, such as recording conversations and making use of a snuff film as leverage.

The KGB conspirators are very hard to pin down, and wouldn’t you know it, they also have a corrupt CIA ally in the mix as well as a man who’s been surgically altered to look like Gorbachev and who’s been brainwashed so he can go on TV and resign the presidency in place of the actual Gorbachev, who gets kidnapped. Your main ally is your Uncle Vanya, an older man in a wheelchair who’s been working undercover at the KGB and who pulled strings to get you on the job. He also has a friend named Major Vovlov who serves as your bad-tempered boss and the game’s ultimate antagonist.

Because the game is so challenging, I recommend consulting a website I’ve linked in the show notes called The KGB File to help you through it. KGB is definitely a game made for adults who want an engaging and sophisticated plot; it doesn’t hold your hand and it has some seriously mature themes it explores along with a lot of Russian names to keep track of from a surprisingly large cast of characters. There are drugs and prostitutes and murders and multiple layers of bureaucracy to keep track of. If you enjoy the intrigue aspects of Metal Gear Solid games, you might find KGB to be a really engaging experience.

Another Cryo’s adventure game is from 1995: Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure, which is also for mature audiences and might seem more accessible, but it’s a polarizing game for multiple reasons. It’s based on the Dark Horse comic book series from the 1990s, primarily the graphic novel Aliens: Labyrinth, to which this game is actually an adaptation but also a sort of sequel.

In the graphic novel Aliens: Labyrinth, the plot revolves around a scientist and former Colonial Marine named Tony Crespi who’s sent to a research space station to secretly monitor Colonel Doctor Paul Church, who’s experimenting on Alien Xenomorphs by putting them in a dark, labyrinth-like maze and learning about how they hunt and make decisions. But it all sort of goes Jurassic Park and, predictably, tragedy occurs.

The game takes place at a time that would simply be defined as “later” and isn’t officially part of the Dark Horse canon despite drawing liberally from it. You play as Lt. Col. Hericksen, not-so-subtly named for the actor Lance Henriksen who played Bishop in the Aliens film. The gameplay is interesting because it’s sort of a point and click adventure due to Hericksen’s appearance in many scenes, but it also looks and plays like a 3D Myst-style game at times.

Even so, this one is mostly a point and click adventure with dialogue trees, inventory puzzles and illustrated characters who pop up in visual novel-style conversations. But there are also some RPG elements and turn-based strategy sequences where you pilot an exosuit and battle Xenomorphs and facehuggers and, towards the end, Colonial Marines.

It’s a surprisingly pretty and interesting game, though the illustrated characters and the pre-rendered scenes do clash a little bit. The voice acting is also pretty bad and clashes with the otherwise dark atmosphere of the game. But probably the biggest complaint about Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure is that it’s so easy to make mistakes and undo all your hard work, and it doesn’t help that the game is also quite buggy. My advice is to play with a walkthrough, because the game isn’t so much challenging as it is limited by a bad interface, time constraints and poor directions.

But if you like your games dark and gritty and set in the future, you might want to check out what Westwood Studios had on tap in 1990 with a different adventure also based on a book.

Infocom’s final years as an Activision adventure game imprint gave rise to a few graphical adventure games and RPGs, many of which were created by Brett W. Sperry and Louis Castle’s Las Vegas-based game studio, Westwood Associates, soon after renamed Westwood Studios. One of Westwood’s earliest games was a 1990 DOS point and click adventure and RPG hybrid called Circuit’s Edge, based on the novel When Gravity Falls by George Alec Effinger. While the game has a cyberpunk feel to it, you’ve never played a setting quite like this because the premise of the story is that the Islamic Arabic culture has become the principal world power and you play as an investigator named Marid Audran who lives in the city of the Budayeen and gets caught in a web of intrigue involving a client he’s framed for murdering and a crime lord benefactor who hires him to get to the bottom of what really happened.

Now, I want to specify that Circuit’s Edge is more a role-playing game with an involved story than a true adventure game. The interface shows stats on the side, a small graphical window with character portraits beside it and a big text box underneath, and moving through the Budayeen is similar to the first person navigation around the town of Skara Brae in The Bard’s Tale. But the game also follows a lot of the classic adventure game conventions of having you collect inventory, solve puzzles and talk to NPCs fairly liberally. There are also a lot of very adult themes in the game, including quite a bit of prostitution and even nudity. It’s interesting and worth checking out, if for no other reason than it tells a story that is quite different from most other games of the era.

Westwood’s next adventure series is one of the ones it’s best-known for, and the proper name of the series is Fables & Fiends, though this was retooled later to reflect the first game’s subtitle, The Legend of Kyrandia. This initial chapter debuted in 1992 and features a character named Brandon, an orphaned young man who has to battle the murderous jester Malcolm, who’s escaped his magical confinement and is using the magical Kyragem to sow mischief around the land, including turning Brandon’s grandfather, the powerful wizard Kallak, into stone. In many ways, the game feels like a King’s Quest-style adventure, though apparently, at least according to the game’s writer and the designer of the sequels, Rick “Coco” Gush, Westwood licensed it from an earlier MUD game called Kyrandia by Richard Skurnick and Scott Brinker, though the inspiration appears to be superficial at best.

The Legend of Kyrandia is a true point and click adventure game in the style of a Sierra or LucasArts adventure with all the elements you’d expect – gorgeous artwork, an inventory scroll at the bottom of the screen and a context-sensitive cursor that allows you to interact with the game world depicted in the top two thirds of the screen. The music by Westwood’s house musician Frank Klepacki is wonderful, and there was even a CD-ROM talkie version released alongside the disk-based version with voice acting, though it’s kind of cringey and nowhere near as good as what Westwood would start to be known for once they started shipping games like Command & Conquer.

The story is basically what you’d expect – as Brandon, you are the chosen one who has to prove his mettle as a hero, discover your claim to the throne and overcome the mischievous machinations of Malcolm, who shows up occasionally to bother you, but who never comes across as particularly menacing. You also befriend a young alchemist named Zanthia who teaches you how to make potions. That might seem like an unimportant detail, but as you’ll see in a moment, she’s not a trivial character.

The Legend of Kyrandia is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s really more in the realm of “lighthearted” than comedic. The jokes are mostly just slapstick or Brandon grumbling about things, and Malcolm has to be one of the least funny jesters in the history of gaming, and also one of the least capable. Suffice it to say he’s the sort of villain who tells you not to go into the room you need to go into to defeat him, and then also is the sort who’s easily defeated by a trick a child would see through. He’s also kind of annoying, a point that’s not lost on Zanthia when she returns in the second game as its protagonist.

And the second game is a little confusing to identify at first because it was originally published in 1993 as Fables & Fiends: The Hand of Fate with a box that didn’t match the first game’s storybook aesthetic and instead depicts a purple hand inset inside an even larger hand and which doesn’t really say “The Legend of Kyrandia - Book 2” anywhere. The back cover’s text is hard to read due to a confusing layout and since Malcolm and Brandon are nowhere to be seen, it’s hard to connect this game to its predecessor. Even worse, the title screen for the game itself also just says “The Hand of Fate.”

But if you play the game, especially if you’re playing the CD-ROM talkie edition, it’s pretty clear you’re playing a sequel as Brandon’s voice kicks off a narration and shows some familiar scenes and characters as Brandon explains that the world is disappearing, piece by piece, and that Zanthia has been selected to retrieve a stone from the center of the world. In fact, later versions of the game even received new box art more in line with the first game and more clearly calling this game “Fables & Fiends – The Legend of Kyrandia Book Two” with no mention of the Hand of Fate, but instead a painted picture of Zanthia traveling through the skies on her quest.

And make no mistake – marketing issues aside, The Hand of Fate is a superior game to the original in every way. It’s more imaginative, it’s funnier, it has better puzzles and Zanthia is just a far more charismatic character than Brandon, with a dry wit and a recast voice actress who adds so much more to the character in the talkie version. And actually, the voice acting in this game is better all the way around, much more in line with the best of Sierra and LucasArts. Frank Klepacki’s score even ups the ante this time with a little more variety and some funk as well as some island-style music. It’s pretty clear the Westwood team took some inspiration from The Secret of Monkey Island instead of King’s Quest this time around, right down to featuring a segment with pirates, but it results in such a better game it was honestly a good move.

Zanthia’s travels are of course not straightforward, and she not only attempts to visit the center of the world, but also wanders around swamps, castles, coves, lava pits, the high reaches of the world and even across a rainbow bridge into the surreal realm of the Wheels of Fate. One of the most-lauded aspects of the game is that she approaches her challenges with a certain confidence and world-weariness that’s unusual for adventure games of the era. She even changes her outfits to suit the places that she goes.

But if you ask me, the best aspect of the game is that there’s no Brandon and no Malcolm. And unfortunately, the game’s standalone story ends with a cliffhanger where Malcolm is freed, setting up a sequel for him to make his return.

The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Three: Malcolm’s Revenge came out in 1994 and while it is very clearly part of the series from the box art and the introductory cinematic, it also looks and plays a bit differently from the other two games. The hand-drawn aesthetic is replaced by largely pre-rendered backgrounds, the inventory bar that lines the bottom of the screen in the previous two games is gone, popping up only when needed, and the gameplay is occasionally interrupted by pre-rendered cutscenes. The credits sequence also has full-motion video sequence featuring the development team at Westwood, with Malcolm causing havoc around the office. You can even see Joe Kucan, who famously played Kane in the Command & Conquer games, make an appearance as the game’s vocal recording director.

And speaking of the acting, Malcolm, thankfully, has been recast with a nastier, more villainous voice for this sequel, and since you play as him this time around, it’s good to see the character be less of a cartoon clown and more of an actual bad guy. That is, of course, assuming you keep him in that persona – this game actually allows you to choose if you want to lie to other characters or be nasty, measuring Malcolm’s behavior with a meter that appears next to the inventory bar.

As adventure games go, Malcom’s Revenge isn’t much of a revenge tale; rather, it’s one of the most surreal, bonkers ones you’ll ever play, with much of the game devoted to realms with talking animals and obnoxious humans who tend to get under Malcolm’s skin. As you might expect, he becomes an unlikely hero and has to kick a group of pirates out of Kyrandia to restore things to the way they used to be. In the end, all he really wants to do is take a nap, but he’s unfortunately blamed for pretty much everything that goes wrong in Kyrandia, which means he also has to clear his name before the game is over.

While Malcom’s Revenge is often thought of as a step down from The Hand of Fate in terms of its adventure game credentials, it’s still a decent adventure game with an absolutely killer soundtrack that’s very much in line with the sort of funky hip-hop industrial tunes you’d hear in Command & Conquer. The strong production values help make the game fun, and thankfully, the humor is a lot sharper than Malcolm’s first outing.

Westwood worked on one more point and click adventure game in the 1990s, and while it was a bit of a slow burner in terms of sales, it did make a positive impression and has since become a true classic. The name of that game? Blade Runner, based on the 1982 feature film of the same name and released in 1997 with an eye for recreating many of the movie’s strongest visuals while telling a parallel story to Rick Deckard’s adventures with the escaped Nexus-6 replicant units led by Roy Batty.

The game focuses on a rookie Blade Runner named Ray McCoy who winds up on the trail of a warrior poet replicant named Clovis who is leading a group of rogue replicants who are all suspects in a crime involving murdering animals – a heinous crime in a future were real animals are exceedingly rare. McCoy has to hunt down all of Clovis’s replicants, but the way the game is structured, who those replicants actually are is randomized, and there are multiple endings available, some of which include McCoy himself being a replicant.

One of the most notable things about Blade Runner is how well it nails the aesthetic of the film. The team at Westwood not only recreated some of the locations, camera transitions and lighting effects, but also extended the world out with new places that look as if they came from scenes we just didn’t get to see in the film. Many of the film’s characters make an appearance and are voiced by the original actors, and the new characters are all voiced by established screen actors, some of whom, like Jeff Garlin and Lisa Edelstein, went on to became quite famous.

The graphics were also quite interesting for the time, fusing pre-rendered footage and a sort of voxel-based rendering of the characters that was able to be done in software without a 3D accelerator card. In the 1990s, this was crucial since it meant delivering graphics that looked 3D without actually having to be 3D. While the game looks movie-accurate in many places, everything was created specifically for the game and nothing was used from the film footage. Since the target resolution was lower than we’d use today, the game does have a sort of grainy look and feel to it that modern ports have not been able to fix since the original source code was lost, but it’s still a darned impressive-looking game that’s still one of the best and most authentic cyberpunk stories out there.

I would love to talk more about Blade Runner, because I’m a huge fan of the original novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Ridley Scott film and the game itself. It was one of the first games I reviewed as a pro game reviewer back in the 1990s and definitely one of my favorites I ever got to write about. But what I’ll ask you to do instead is just go out and get yourself a copy and play it, because it’s one of the best adventure games of the late 1990s and short and straightforward enough that you can play it multiple times and see its many variations.

And while I don’t think you’ll need a walkthrough, I will say that there are some pretty good guides that explain how the innerworkings of the game function, and if you want to see the thirteen different endings the game has, you’d be wise to use them!

In the 1990s, Ray McCoy was far from the only detective in a trenchcoat running around a post-apocalyptic 21^st century California, and some of his stiffest competition came from a character introduced by Access Software in 1989 in an adventure game called Mean Streets. I covered this game way back in Episode 4 of the podcast when we talked about 80s adventure games, and listeners may recall that this is the first game featuring Tex Murphy, a character who’d come to be played by Chris Jones, who posed for the digitized pictures of Tex in this game. The game was originally supposed to be a follow-up to Access Software’s 3D flight game Echelon, which is why it included a 3D engine for flying Tex’s car.

The 1991 sequel, Martian Memorandum, ditched the 3D in favor of a more conventional adventure game design with some digitized movies and sounds, and it is an interesting adventure in its own right, largely focusing the gameplay built around dialogue and interrogations, with a handful of inventory puzzles to help grease the conservational wheels.

Unfortunately for Martian Memorandum, it’s also sort of the black sheep of the series today because the next few games not only brought back the 3D gameplay by allowing Tex to walk around and explore the game world first person style, but also added in significantly more digital footage to make the games feel more like interactive movies. We’re going to talk about all of these games – Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Detective, the Mean Streets remake Tex Murphy: Overseer and even the more recent 2014 revival Tesla Effect – in our next episode as we cover 3D and FMV games.

But Access Software made some other adventure games in the 1990s, and both of them are quite a bit more obscure than the Tex Murphy games. The first of these is 1990’s Countdown, a point and click adventure that uses digitized characters, portraits and backgrounds to tell a story about an amnesiac CIA agent who wakes up in a mental hospital in Turkey and has to escape so he can foil a terrorist plot. While I know that this sounds like pretty well-trod territory, Countdown is one of the better games using the old Bourne Identity setup, and one of the most interesting things about it is that the game includes a dialogue system where you can try different approaches as you talk with other characters and sometimes get really interesting outcomes, though one of the game’s biggest faults is how you can wind up in unwinnable situations and find yourself having to replay earlier sections. It’s definitely a game where you need to save often.

The first half of Countdown is definitely the stronger portion as you find a way to escape your room in the mental hospital and gear your bearings. One of the nicer aspects of the game is that you only enter rooms where you can actually do something and otherwise navigate using a top-down map. This limits the number of red herrings you have to deal with in screens or locations that are really just there to string important areas together, and once you finally are able to travel around the Mediterranean in the second half of the game, it feels like the game world really opens up, though you have to be careful you don’t waste precious time going places too far out of the way. The game could also give you some more hints about what you have to do, however – a lot of essential items are hidden and you need to get used to using the move command on just about everything you see.

Beyond the frustrations around Countdown’s difficulty, which are easily solved today with walkthroughs and longplay videos, there are some goofy things that make it endearing. For example, you run into a fellow patient who’s sitting nude in an interrogation room and making goofy faces while you talk to him. Many of the other characters don’t look so much like actors as corporate drones Access Software grabbed from a nearby office and asked to make some funny faces. Your main character, who’s named the oh-so-creative name of Mason Powers *ugh* looks like an Eddie Bauer model in a button-up shirt and khakis.

There’s also a bad guy named Scorpio and another character named McBain, which is quite funny if you enjoy The Simpsons but which we can’t really fault the developers for since the show hadn’t introduced those characters yet. Call that a happy coincidence.

I really recommend Countdown and hope more people will check it out – it’s way better than Sierra’s 1990 thriller adventure Codename: ICEMAN and while it’s a bit dated and has a pretty anticlimactic ending, there’s a lot of fun to be had if you bother to play through it.

The 1992 point and click adventure game Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a little harder to recommend because it has aged so badly. It’s very easy to confuse this game with Sierra Discovery’s Lost in the Rainforest, but it’s actually quite a different game, much more in the style of Indiana Jones or the 1984 film Romancing the Stone and featuring some absolutely dated tropes from old movie serials and the 1958 film Wild Women of Wongo, a movie that designer Chris Jones enjoyed so much that he adapted ideas from it. I’m assuming he did so because the movie’s in the “so bad it’s good” camp, but the problem is that the game itself doesn’t feel like it’s in on the joke.

Amazon is broken up into fourteen short chapters that play sort of like a movie serial. You’re Jason Roberts, a researcher in search of your brother Allen, who disappears in the Amazon during an expedition due to what seems to be foul play. On his journey, Jason meets an attractive blond white woman named Maya who seems to hate men but of course turns out to be a scout for a tribe of literal Amazons who live in the Amazon, complete with low-cut outfits and grass skirts or swimsuit bottoms. Oh, and did I mention the actual natives are cannibals who are wowed by little tricks you do with your inventory items and apparently believe white-skinned people are gods?

Sensitivity to other cultures is pretty lacking here, as is a sense of direction – background NPCs will have elaborate backstories, narration will take over when the game doesn’t want to depict the next logical action, and the game rarely tells you what you actually need to do in order to advance the plot. There are also moments where the story will end one chapter of the serial and then recap what just happened. It sort of feels like this is all by design in some sort of parody of other adventure games, but again, it’s not executed well enough that the designers tip their hand to show you it was on purpose.

One of the weirder things about the game is the audio narration, which sounds like it’s being delivered by an infomercial announcer reading a script rather than an actor attempting to set the mood. Many of the other lines in the game that get an audio reading also tend to be of the overly flat or scenery-chewing variety, as if the actors were just the folks Access Software could round up from their social circles. The audio is also noticeably highly compressed, but you can’t be too picky about that because the game was only released on floppy disk.

Another odd aspect of the game is the graphics are about half digitized and half hand-drawn. The main character, Jason, has a digital portrait, but his walk-around avatar is noticeably illustrated. Many of the other characters he encounters are digitized from real actors, but some, especially the native Amazon tribe later in the game, look like they came from a storybook. It’s really jarring visually, and it feels like Access Software’s ambition may have exceeded their grasp, especially since this game uses a Super VGA display mode.

But by far the weirdest thing is that the game features a number of death scenes preceded by glowing red letters that say “SHOCK WARNING” before showing your often not-so-gruesome demise. There’s also a weird note in the credits that no insects were harmed in the making of the game, which is weird because a giant ant that murders Jason in one of the death scenes. Again, you have to imagine this was all part of an attempt to spoof the source material and amuse the audience, not to play any of this seriously.

I’m not saying Amazon: Guardians of Eden is a bad game by any means – it’s reasonably engaging and has some good moments. But it’s definitely not Access Software’s best, and when we talk about Tex Murphy in our next episode, we’ll see how far they were able to evolve adventure gaming with a far better setting and design.

Another adventure game I can only recommend as a curiosity comes from Revolution Software, and that’s not because it’s a bad game so much as their first attempt at a genre they’d go on to master later on. This game came out in 1992 originally for the Amiga and it’s called Lure of the Temptress. I don’t even really want to spend a lot of time describing it because it’s honestly a pretty dull game where even the promise of a sexy villainess is barely realized since she has so little presence in the game. You mostly see humans who are under the oppression of pig-faced monsters called Skorl, and even an encounter with a dragon mid-game is anticlimactic. If you want to try Lure of the Temptress, it’s freeware now and easy to try out. But you’d be better off playing Revolution’s next game, which is also freeware, but much more interesting: the 1994 cyberpunkish point and click adventure Beneath a Steel Sky, a game that was mostly popular in Europe in the 1990s but which has since become an international cult classic that even got a sequel in 2019.

The premise of Beneath a Steel Sky is that you are a survivor of a helicopter crash in the Australian Outback who was raised by Aboriginees who live there. You’re given the name “Robert Foster” because the tribe spots a can of Foster’s Lager in the wreckage. As you grow up, you build a companion robot named Joey who can be upgraded into other robots during the game. And this is really useful, because you’re kidnapped and taken to a place called Union City, where you have to escape the minions of LINC, a powerful computer mainframe that runs the city.

By the way, most of this backstory is relayed through comic book artwork drawn by Dave Gibbons, the co-creator and artist of Watchmen. It’s really neat.

As the game proceeds, you have to work your way through the city and learn more about who you really are and how you’re connected to LINC. I won’t spoil the story, because it’s actually interesting, but it has heavy overtones of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World with Foster playing the role of the Savage, but also inverting things so he’s the savior of a dystopian society instead of the self-flagellating misfit of a misguided utopia.

Beneath a Steel Sky is also notable for having a fairly interesting tone with lots of humor interspersed within the game’s more serious science fiction premise. The writing is good and the voice acting helps to bring the characters to life, though I find Robert a Joey a bit grating since Robert sounds like a generic hero and Joey’s voice sound like’s it’s filtered through a cheap electric fan.

Revolution’s defining moment, however, is their next game, 1996’s Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, which was released in North America under the rather stupid name Circle of Blood. The game opens with an amazing and lavishly animated introduction in Paris where the main character, the American tourist George Stobbart, is sitting outside his favorite café when a sinister-looking clown drops off an accordion loaded with explosives and blows the place to smithereens, killing a mysterious old man in the process. And as soon as the animation ends, the game puts you right into the scene, maintaining roughly the same level of animation and launching George into a lengthy adventure investigating why this strange bombing even happened, though he finds no help from the local French authorities, who seem more interested in covering up the case than solving the mystery.

George soon meets a photojournalist named Nicole “Nico” Collard who becomes his ally in uncovering what’s really happening, and the two find themselves mixed up in an intriguing story that involves the Knights Templar and a group of Neo-Templars who are trying to acquire the power of an ancient deity. Unlike most adventure games, which can be beaten in a few hours, Broken Sword is a really long game that can last a dozen or more hours in your first playthrough thanks to a lot of lengthy conversations that make the characters feel as if they exist to do more than just hand out puzzle clues and inventory items as well as some fun puzzles that never get in the way of the game but do require some thought here and there.

The original version of Broken Sword is great, but if you play it today, chances are good you’ll be playing the Director’s Cut edition from 2009 that adds in additional Nico scenes where she’s actually playable and kicks off the game with her own introduction, which adds in a sinister mime who appears to be involved in the murder plot. This version also adds in portraits for the characters whenever they’re speaking and comic book panel-style action windows, especially in the new scenes. I’m personally not sure that Broken Sword needed all this extra content, as it was fine on its own, but it did help the game to reach a broader audience on the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS and mobile devices.

The 1997 sequel, Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror, sends George on a quest to rescue Nico from a group of cultists who are trying to once again obtain the power of a God, this time from the Mayan mythology. Once again, this is a lavishly animated game with absolutely stunning graphics and lots and lots of fully voiced dialogue, but it’s also noticeably shorter than the original. I definitely recommend this one, but it feels like a made for TV sequel rather than a true continuation of the original game.

From the third game onward, the Broken Sword series has changed things up with each entry, but each also has a much longer and more satisfying story than the second game. 2003’s Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is an action adventure game with some climbing and platforming mechanics and also gives you direct control over the characters rather than a point and click interface, which is good, because it was also released on the Xbox and, in Europe, on the PlayStation 2.

The fourth game, Broken Sword: The Angel of Death, released in 2006, only made it out on Windows computers. It’s once again a 3D game, but this time, it uses a point and click interface in some parts and direct control in others. It’s somewhat polarizing because it initially sidelines Nico and instead introduces a blonde American woman named Anna Maria, but it’s a fine adventure on its own and worth playing if you’re invested in the series.

The most recent game, Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse, debuted in 2013 as part one of a two-part series that concluded in 2014. This chapter returned to the more traditional point and click animated style of the original game and it’s easily the best-looking game in the series. The story and puzzles are a little less inspired, but if you’ve bothered to play the first four games, you’re of course going to want to see what happens to George and Nico in the fifth, particularly since this story’s mystery comes the closest to many of the themes explored in the first game, though this time it’s a Gnostic cult trying to destroy God with the help of Lucifer himself. The game also hints at the end that George and Nico might finally get together, which will hopefully be what will happen in the upcoming Broken Sword: Parzival’s Stone, which keeps getting delayed, but which series creator Charles Cecil continues to say is coming.

Here’s to hoping we’ll see it soon.

I know you’re probably worried that we’re getting close to the dregs now that we’ve talked about so many fantastic 1990s point and click adventure games already, but I promise that we still have a few left worth mentioning.

And since Broken Sword is so lavishly animated, this seems like as great a time as any to bring up another game that evokes that feeling of watching a cartoon: the 1997 adventure game from Burst and Virgin Games called Toonstruck, starring the great character actor Christopher Lloyd as Drew Blanc, a human who gets pulled into the animated world he’s created. It felt like Christopher Lloyd was in everything around this time after Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Back to the Future movies really raised his stature, and this game has plenty of other famous 90s staples from comedies and animation, including Ben Stein, Tim Curry, Dan Castellaneta, Jeff Bennett, Corey Burton, Rob Paulsen, April Winchell, Tress MacNeille, Jim Cummings, Frank Welker, David Ogden Stiers and Dom DeLuise.

Yes, this is the rare adventure game where the voice cast isn’t just imitating famous actors, but actually has a cast full of them!

The premise of the game is that Drew Blanc is the creator the Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun Show, a show that pays his bills but which he hates. He really wants to build a show around his snarky purple cartoon character Flux Wildly, but his studio head isn’t interested in that and demands more cute bunny designs instead. Drew falls asleep and enters the world of his creations, where he finds out that an evil character named Count Nefarious is changing the world of Cutopia into a dark and twisted place, and Drew and Flux have to stop Nefarious and save the world from disaster.

If I have a complaint about the story, it’s that Drew and Flux only briefly see the effects of Nefarious’s evil plan before they’re already taking on a quest to undo it. It makes the story feel poorly-paced and completely erases the stakes established in the first part of the introduction, and I don’t feel like Toonstruck ever fully recovers from that choice. If you’re here for story or puzzles, you’ll find Toonstruck to be quite a letdown. It’s better to just play it as a game that’s full of cartoon antics and enjoy the ride, because this game’s way more of a looker than anything else.

Of course, if you want something starring cartoon characters who are way stupider, there’s another animated adventure game from Viacom Games that’ll be right up your alley: the 1995 game MTV’s Beavis & Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity, a pitch-perfect adventure game that feels like the cartoon show has come to life on your computer, complete with the same disclaimer and introduction at the beginning and plenty of included animation. When you finally get to play the adventure game itself, you get to take Beavis and Butt-Head around Highland High School, annoying Daria and interacting with Principal Vicker and Mr. Buzzcut and hocking loogies off the roof in the first of several minigames.

As far as a plot, there’s about as much of one as you’d expect from a game starring Beavis & Butt-head. They’ll sit on the couch and watch music videos, they’ll try to follow around their aggressive idol Todd and they’ll annoy Mr. Anderson or their boss at BurgerWorld or even get tossed in prison for awhile. The interface for the game is somewhat like the one LucasArts used in Full Throttle, allowing you to pull up a sort of radial menu with icons for actions. You can also choose whether or not you want Beavis or Butt-head to respond in conversations with various characters.

The result is a really funny game that makes amazing use of its license and which honestly is one of the stronger mid-1990s point and click adventure games, right up there with anything LucasArts or Sierra published and extremely well-crafted all around. The various arcade action minigames keep the adventure game elements from becoming too tedious, but they also don’t wear out their welcome. The game’s plot, while meandering, fits the characters perfectly, and unlike every other Beavis & Butt-Head game made in the 1990s, you’re not doing anything the duo wouldn’t do. The end of the game even has them get locked in the trunk of Todd’s car so that Daria can overhear them making stupid jokes and rescue them, only for Beavis and Butt-head to return home, having learned nothing. It’s a perfect ending to a surprisingly great adventure game, and probably the best adaptation of a cartoon show until 2014’s South Park: The Stick of Truth pulled off a similarly great game.

And just to illustrate how bad things could have been, GT Interactive published its own adventure game in 1999 called Beavis and Butt-Head Do U. and it’s pretty boring and completely unchallenging despite trying to replicate the same gameplay.

But let’s now turn to a few of the other great adventures of the 1990s that dip a little more into the realm of horror instead of animated antics.

We’ll start with a title published by Electronic Arts and developed by Flashpoint Productions called Noctropolis, and it is a fascinating fusion of digitized characters, gorgeous artwork often warped by a fishbowl perspective and full-motion video. The game begins in our world, where a comic book shop owner named Peter Grey is reading through his favorite comic, which features a trio of villains named Luscious, Tophat and Desperado facing off with a shadowy caped hero named Darksheer and his beautiful sidekick Stiletto. Darksheer’s powers come from an ancient Egyptian substance called Liquidark. It’s peak 1990s Image Comics-style cheese; the heroes don’t have a code against killing and there’s plenty of T&A, but everyone also avoids swearing and the heroes agonize about their crimes to a priest. The intro is surprisingly lengthy and nearly the size of a full comic book.

Then Peter has a dream about a vampire succubus seducing him and wakes up to receive a package from a courier with another comic inside, this time detailing the formation of a new supervillain team under the leadership of a mysterious villain named Flux. An obelisk appears and Peter steps inside, and steps out into perpetually dark world of the “City of Night,” Noctropolis. With Darksheer missing, Peter assumes his identity and teams up with Stiletto to take on this new threat.

As you can probably already tell, this game was made for a certain target audience and was marketed as being sexy and violent, though there’s actually very little sex or violence in the actual game. It’s actually a lot sillier than it looks. One of my favorite puzzles involves getting a dog who’s guarding a platform to jump into a huge pit by dangling a sausage on a string in front of him, with a pitiful howl playing as he falls for it. It makes me laugh every time.

But much of this game involves wandering around and reading lots of text. And I mean lots of it – think of a comic where there’s more captions than dialogue and where the action is told to you as often as it’s shown. All of the dialogue itself is fully voiced and acted out by one of the hammiest green screen casts you’ll ever see, but the production values are high, and once again, we have a game that pulls off a lot of what Phantasmagoria was trying to do, but more effectively.

Noctropolis is definitely a game I’d recommend, both for its endearingly cheesy story and its beautiful graphics. Even your pop-up action menu looks interesting as you see the verbs you can use divided up into sections atop a pyramid-like triangle. It’s more style than substance and quite a tease, like the 90s comics it’s imitating, but it’s a definitely an adventure unlike any other you’ve ever played.

Another sort of wacky horror game from the same era is called Harvester, and it was made by DigiFX Interactive and published in Europe by Virgin Interactive and in North America by a schlockhouse publisher called Merit Studios in 1996. And Harvester is schlock of the highest order, a horror game where you play as an amnesiac named Steve Mason who awakens in 1953 in a town called Harvest where everyone seems to be more than a little off. Every character you meet feels like they’re playing a role in a 1950s sitcom that’s simmering with anger and resentment underneath, sort of like Twin Peaks meets Silent Hill. Things quickly get weird in ways I don’t want to describe because so much of the fun of this game is its shock value.

And Harvester is shocking. At different points in the game, full motion video sequences will play where Steve watches absolutely bewildering things play out, and they’re rendered more interesting by the fact that the acting in this game is so endearingly bad that you’ll find yourself wanting to rewatch certain scenes and imitate the tortured dialogue. If Mystery Science Theatre 3000 had ever found an adventure game to feature, it’d be Harvester, and I mean that in the best possible way, because it’s absolutely entertaining to play through, provided you’re old enough to handle its gore and clumsy handling of sex.

Speaking of which, the Game Grumps, who are the closest thing to video gaming’s MST3k, have a great video featuring Harvester, and it’s in the show notes!

But if you’d like your horror games a little less silly, you might want to turn to Infogrames’s two Call of Cthulhu adventures from 1993 and 1995. The first is called Shadow of the Comet, and it’s generally regarded as an excellent take on the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos, placing you in the New England coastal village of Illsmouth and having you investigate a case where a scientist went mad during the previous passing of Halley’s Comet. As you arrive in town in 1910 three days before the comet can be observed, some of the people in the town are standoffish and suspicious, and some have strange characteristics that suggest they may be connected to the horrific Old Ones, ancient evil eldritch beings who are worshipped as gods by the local cultists but who will bring about the end of the world if they’re successfully summoned.

For those familiar with the Mythos, you encounter Yog-Sothoth, Dagon and of course Cthulhu in the course of the game, and you’ll also hear a namecheck for at least one other elder god as well. The story is a combination of elements from several Lovecraft stories including “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and of course “The Call of Cthulhu,” but it does depart in a couple of ways. First of all, most of the residents of Illsmouth are not evil and actually are glad that you rid them of the evil cultists in a surprisingly upbeat ending, which is atypical for a Lovecraft-based story. Second, you face the elder gods directly but never succumb to insanity, another common trope of Lovecraft’s tragic heroes.

While Shadow of the Comet isn’t perfect by any means, it plays like an icon-driven Sierra adventure and has a lengthy, interesting plot to uncover and some memorable character interactions and great horror scenes.

The sequel, Prisoner of Ice, hews much more closely to the story “At the Mountains of Madness” and while the original game had a nice illustrated style, this one uses digitized characters walking around painted backgrounds. It also shifts the plot forward to 1937 and adds in some Nazis, which is honestly where the game gets pretty silly. While it’s tangentially connected to the original game in a very unsatisfying manner, it’s also half as interesting and about a quarter of the length of it. I honestly don’t recommend it unless you are really curious.

Another horror series you should check out, however, is Dark Seed, which was released in two parts in 1992 and 1995 by Cyberdreams and which prominently features the artwork of H.R. Giger, best-known for the design of the Alien Xenomorph in the feature film Alien. You play as Mike Dawson, a mustachioed self-insert of the game’s creator and owner of a newly purchased old mansion that turns out to be a gateway to a parallel world that’s sort of like the Upside-Down in Stranger Things. He dreams that an alien embryo gets shot into his brain, and sure enough, this creature, the Dark Seed, is intended to hatch from his head and destroy his world, paving the way for the ancients from the Dark World to take over.

Dark Seed is a very average adventure game with an oppressive timing mechanic and tricky puzzles, and thus it’s best-played with a walkthrough. But the reason you’d even want to is because the story is interesting, the horror atmosphere is tense and the graphics are incredible, utilizing large swaths of Giger’s artwork to create the Dark World and give the game a true sense of otherworldliness. The higher resolution used in the game necessitated a more restricted color palette for the graphics hardware of the day, and that actually adds a distinctive quality to the game, with our world being rendered in browns, greens and blues and the Dark World having a cold, sterile white, blue and gray quality to it. The frame around the gameplay window also changes from ornate curtains to alien gargoyles framing a monitor.

The second Dark Seed was made without Mike Dawson’s involvement, but the character in the game is still based on him. H.R. Giger’s artwork still features prominently, but the game’s far more digitized this time around, using a blend of photography and pre-rendered objects. Chris Gilbert plays Mike this time, and he sounds ten years younger despite the fact that this game’s a sequel. Tone is also a problem. Crowley, Texas is not nearly as good a setting as the mansion from the first game, and the motivation of catching a Dark World shapeshifter is a lot less pressing than getting an evil alien embryo out of your head.

The game’s music is absolutely awful and the normal world just feels… off. I’ve seen people compare it to David Lynch works like Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks and I think that comparison is appropriate since the intent of the scenes seems to be to skewer small town culture. Once you get into the Dark World, though, the game goes a bit bonkers, and by the end of the game, the body count’s surprisingly high and the ending has a twist that you’ll either love or hate, but which made it impossible to make a third game with Mike Dawson as the lead.

That’s just as well, because Cyberdreams published another game the same year based on the Harlan Ellison short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” and the game is notable for having Ellison’s involvement. It was a commercial flop that has since become a cult classic, though I’ll warn you it’s very much a love it or hate it kind of game.

I’m going to presume listeners probably don’t know much about Harlan Ellison, but he was a well-respected and award-winning science fiction writer primarily known for television and magazine stories. He was always a polarizing figure in his lifetime, outspoken about his conviction that writers deserve to be paid and credited for their work, obsessive about creative control and also quite happy to torch collaborators, producers and Hollywood studios when he felt his work was being tampered with.

He had a long feud with Gene Roddenberry over the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which he originally wrote. He hated Roddenberry’s rewrite and made such a stink that he published several of the teleplays in a 1995 book that included a lot of self-important essays.

He also sued a lot of people, quite famously including James Cameron, alleging that The Teminator’s core concept was stolen from one of Ellison’s old Outer Limits episodes called “Soldier.” The connection was tenuous at best and it’s debatable Ellison’s idea about a time-traveling soldier was even that original, but he got his settlement from Orion Pictures all the same.

Ellison was also an outspoken critic of video games, which he said were “time wasters.”

So you can imagine what a mess Cyberdreams had on its hand trying to market their ambitious adventure game, which has a gripping and memorable title, but which is based on an absolutely bonkers story about a supercomputer named AM that kills off the global population except for five people – a woman and four men – and then extends their lives and changes their bodies so it can torture them indefinitely.

In the short story, the humans eventually escape to go and find some canned food and wind up killing each other. But one survives, and AM turns him into a gelatinous blob who no longer has a mouth or any ability to end his own life – hence the title.

In the game, this is one of the endings, but the story is changed to AM coming up with a new way to torture everyone by playing a game in which they each enter a sort of psychodrama and have to find a way to defeat AM. The game sort of follows the same template of the later Persona RPGs where each character has to overcome a flaw and find a way to live with their past, but two of AM’s three supercomputers that make up its electronic brain have sympathy on the humans and attempt to help them.

The game is incredibly messed up and features a number of endings, including an actually happy one as well as a lot of unhappy ones where your chosen character in the final chapter becomes a blob. Curiously, Ellison didn’t seem to understand that the game was winnable and bragged both before and after release that the only way to win was not to play – perhaps a promise Cyberdreams had made during production but chickened out on in the final build. But Ellison still looms large over the game – he voices AM and he clearly really loved having the chance to play his most psychopathic character, because he relishes reading those lines in the game.

I do want to mention that there are some very controversial aspects of the game, not the least of which is the trauma and rape of the lone female character, Ellen. But there’s also a Nazi scientist named Nimdok who AM relates to the most, but who resulted in the game being censored in France and Germany, making the game almost impossible to win since you need Nimdok – or at least the knowledge he has - to be able to get the actual good ending without consulting a walkthrough or guessing at a puzzle. That might account for why Ellison was confused about the game actually having one.

As a point and click adventure, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is a fascinating game well worth playing today. It’s unique in how it plays, it has a strong story that will keep you captivated and it’s fairly short and not too difficult. Just be aware that it’s not for everyone, and if you’re easily triggered by trauma, this game’s going to be an intense suffering simulator you’d best avoid.

There’s one more series I want to cover before we close out this week, and it’s The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, a surprisingly well-crafted adventure game series from Mythos Software and Electronic Arts that uses a point and click style to set Holmes and Watson out and about exploring London and investigating cases. The first game 1992’s The Case of the Serrated Scalpel, puts you on the trail of either Jack the Ripper or, as Holmes suspects, a clever copycat who has left behind the clue of a scalpel with a serrated blade.

The game is portrayed in an illustrated style with a verb and dialogue panel on the bottom third of the screen and the action shown in the top two thirds. Much of the interaction involves examining things and letting Holmes and Watson talk to one another, and there are of course some inventory puzzles and other basic deductions to be made.

This is largely a traditional point and click adventure game with a lot of text to read and dialogue trees to exhaust as you search for clues and try to trap people with deductive logic so they’ll provide needed information. The story isn’t based on one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales and thus feels a bit twisty turny and contrived at times, but it’s still a decent take on the source material.

There’s also a 1996 sequel called The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Rose Tattoo which ditches the illustrated look and feel of the original game for digitized characters and tries to recreate Victorian London with period costumes and scenes. I actually prefer the look and feel of the 1992 game to this one, but I can’t deny that it’s an impressive sequel that succeeds in using filmed digitized characters on sets far better than Sierra’s experiments with Phantasmagoria did the year before. The game world feels substantial and, when you’re out on the streets, even alive. The detailed map of Victorian-era London is also a lot of fun, particularly if you know the city and can spot locations that correspond to today.

Both games are also right up there with ICOM Simulations’ full motion video series Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, which we’ll discuss next week.

We’ve covered so much ground in our adventure gaming series that I know you’re thinking, “Sean, there is no way there could possibly be more 1990s point and click adventure games we need to discuss. You’ve covered them all!”

If only that were true! I have here in front of me a list of a whole bunch of games I didn’t even get a chance to cover, and if you take a look at the written version of my script on greatestgames.substack.com, you can find all of these games along with links to their entry on MobyGames.

And by the way, let me clarify: have I played all these games through? Heck no! At most I’ve played enough to get an impression of what they have to offer, and in a few cases, I’ve just watched video playthroughs or read about them. But here’s the thing. Many of these games came from smaller publishers or from outside the US and UK, and as a result, they didn’t get as strong of coverage and don’t have the same sorts of fanbases as more popular games. That doesn’t mean they’re bad! It just means that they’re obscure and that one of them might become your new favorite game if you play it and like it.

So, once you exhaust all of the other games we’ve discussed, give some of these a shot!

And with that, we’ve reached the end of our exploration of point and click adventure games from the 1990s! In our next episode, we’re going to finally cover the multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Under a Killing Moon, Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7^th Guest, The Last Express, Black Dahlia and The Neverhood. And of course we have an obligation to accept Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.

And guess what? We haven’t really covered console and handheld adventure games, so we’re going to talk about those too. Count on an episode devoted to those!

Then we’ll finally close by touching on the 21^st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream.

We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!

If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.

And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!

I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRY

Before I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.

This week, I’m recommending Mini Motorways, a game by Dinosaur Polo Club that came out in 2019 on iOS devices as part of Apple Arcade before getting a port to Windows in 2021 and the Switch in 2022. It’s the follow-up to their earlier minimalist train game Mini Metro, and while it’s not quite as simple as drawing lines on a route map, it’s a little more strategic because you have a few tricks up your sleeve to route traffic that weren’t there in the earlier title.

The game is presented in a minimalist SimCity sort of format where you need to connect homes of a certain color to destinations of the same color using roads, of which you have a limited number of tiles you can use. As the weeks advance, you earn tools like stoplights, roundabouts, tunnels, bridges and highways that can help you deal with traffic jams and route traffic more effectively. The game goes until you have a destination that’s not receiving enough traffic, and then it ends, allowing you to start over and try again.

I enjoy this game because it’s simple and fun and doesn’t take much of my time, and yet has enough layers of complexity to make loading up a new map a challenging and interesting experience for a coffee break or a few moments of Zen. For $10, it’s a good deal, and even better, it’s often on sale and offered in a bundle with the equally great Mini Metro. Give it a try – it’s really wonderful!

A List of Adventures I didn’t cover!

Each of the following adventure games is interesting for some reason. I won’t defend them all as being great, but give them a shot - you may find a new game you absolutely love! (Listed by year, then alphabetical)

• Earthrise (1990) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2151/earthrise/)

• The Hugo Trilogy (1990-1992) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/71030/the-hugo-trilogy/)

• Murders in Space (1990) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/4803/murders-in-space/)

• The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian (1991) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/5024/the-adventures-of-maddog-williams-in-the-dungeons-of-duridian/)

• Spaceship Warlock (1991) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/22016/spaceship-warlock/)

• Suspicious Cargo (1991) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/54818/suspicious-cargo/)

• Bargon Attack (1992) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/13178/bargon-attack/)

• Eternam (1992) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1368/eternam/)

• Hook (1992) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/20230/hook/)

• Rome: Pathway to Power (1992) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2232/rome-pathway-to-power/)

• Black Sect (1993) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2571/black-sect/)

• Blue Force (1993) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1478/blue-force/)

• Igor: Objective Uikokahonia (1994) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2170/igor-objective-uikokahonia/)

• Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb (1994) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/4008/inherit-the-earth-quest-for-the-orb/)

• Bureau 13 (1995) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/6601/bureau-13/)

• Chewy: Esc from F5 (1995) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2339/chewy-esc-from-f5/)

• Dračí Historie (English: Dragon History) (1995) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/44689/draci-historie/)

• Flight of the Amazon Queen (1995) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/352/flight-of-the-amazon-queen/) - Free on GOG!

• Teen Agent (1995) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/6423/teen-agent/) - Free on GOG!

• Alien Incident (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1924/alien-incident/)

• Down in the Dumps (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/652/down-in-the-dumps/)

• Fable (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1893/fable/)

• Imperium Romanum (1996) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/6300/imperium-romanum/)

• Ark of Time (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2156/ark-of-time/)

• Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/7659/tony-tough-and-the-night-of-roasted-moths/)

• U.F.O.s (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/4556/ufos/)

• VooDoo Kid (1997) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/16006/voodoo-kid/)

• Galador - The Prince and the Coward (1998) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/30716/galador-the-prince-and-the-coward/)

• Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy (1998) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/2564/nightlong-union-city-conspiracy/)

• Hopkins FBI (1998) (https://www.mobygames.com/game/3994/hopkins-fbi/)

As for 1999? There really weren’t any notable point and click adventures from that year we haven’t already covered except for Cookie’s Bustle (https://www.mobygames.com/game/112541/cookies-bustle/), a peculiar Japanese point and click adventure that’s most famous for being targeted by a copyright troll from 2022 to 2023 to try to erase all evidence of its existence. It’s only playable in Japanese without a fan patch and it’s quite dark and challenging despite its cutesy exterior, so while it’s a fun curiosity, it’s not an easy game to pick up and play.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

RELEASE DATE: 1990

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Natsume

BEST VERSIONS: NES

Let’s get it out of the way now – S.C.A.T. is a terrible name for a video game, even if it actually is a clunky acronym for Special Cybernetic Attack Team. With just a little rearranging of words, the game could have been T.A.S.C. or C.A.S.T. or even C.A.T.S., and that’s just if Natsume had decided to keep those four words instead of using Action in New York, which was the European name Infogrammes came up with, or the far more generic Fainaru Mission (“Final Mission”) Natsume used in Japan. One can only presume that the person in charge of localization was not a fan of the game and wanted to ensure that its stench would be well-communicated to buyers by using a name that conjured up pellets of animal feces.

But in truth, S.C.A.T. is pretty decent scrolling shoot ‘em up that closely resembles Capcom’s great arcade game Forgotten Worlds and which offers two players to take on the role of two cyborgs to stop alien invaders under the leadership of Vile Malmort who’ve constructed a space elevator called the “Astrotube” between the ruined New York City and their own orbital spacecraft. The manual and the opening screens explain that in response to this, the President assembles a team of the world’s greatest scientists and tasks them with finding a solution. Their best idea is to create a team of floating cybernetic warriors who are small enough to infiltrate the base but armed to the teeth with destructive power adapted from the alien technology. Each has their own character portrait that’s a dead ringer for a famous science fiction movie personality, which you’d probably assume anyway since the characters are not-so imaginatively named Arnold and Sigourney.

That is, at least, the North American version of the tale; in Europe, the story is only slightly altered to rename the heroes “Silver Man” and “Sparks,” and the team is called S.A.T. (Special Attack Team) rather than the sillier American equivalent. And in Japan, the team is made up of two men with matching flattops and the team is fighting through a far more desperate global invasion.

But enough about the story – let’s get to the gameplay, which is what most players will focus on anyway. Much like Forgotten Worlds, the players control floating human cyborgs armed with weapons that can be upgraded through power-ups picked up as they fly through stages in a horizontal and vertical scrolling shoot ‘em up style. Each player can only fire left and right, but each also has two satellites that swivel back and forth from front to back and which can be stopped in different configurations to provide constant fire in one or two directions. This is a very handy technique for stages where things are scrolling upwards, such as the third level’s space elevator, where having one of the satellites point upwards helps to clear the screen of descending enemies.

S.C.A.T. offers three equippable modes of fire that are fairly similar to the things you’d find in a run and gun game like Contra – a laser weapon, a rocket bomb and a wave cannon – and would suffer from this lack of variety if the level design wasn’t so interesting. After the first stage’s ruins of New York takes players across the ground and up around a skyscraper, the action returns to the ground for a rather simple initial boss than can be taken out by sitting in one place and firing continuously. Later levels include far more sophisticated enemies that require dodging and making use of both your standard weapon and satellites to take out weapons and weak points. One mission even takes place in space around a giant space battleship where you have to disarm all of the cannons and rocket launchers before you can sneak in and take out the engines. The space elevator level varies the speed as you ascend the giant Astrotube and forces you to dodge debris as well as enemies, and the fifth and final level, perhaps the toughest in the game, has numerous timing puzzles that require you to move quickly around pistons and electrical charges as you head towards Vile Malmort, who is impressively huge but surprisingly easy to vanquish.

Because S.C.A.T. is a fairly easy game that can be beaten in about a half an hour, it’s a decent one to play with a friend, particularly since the game is quite generous with continues for each stage. Each player is equipped with six lives that really function like hit points – drain them all and you’re dead. There’s unfortunately no way to revive the other player without continuing, but the game is so simple with two players that it really shouldn’t be a problem for most pairs to advance a stage or two and then continue from there when they’re mostly dead.

One thing that surprised me was the production values, which feature some cool atmospheric background effects, really smooth scrolling and character animation, a nice-looking introductory cutscene cinematic, a Ghosts ‘n Goblins-style map between stages and even a digitized voice at the beginning of the game saying, “You must destroy them. The Earth is counting on you!! Good luck!” Kiyohiro Sada’s score is also above average. No one will mistake S.C.A.T. as anything but a NES game, but it is definitely a surprisingly decent one for a game that’s flown so far under the radar for so long.

Unfortunately, the game has not been re-released for any modern consoles, though Natsume did put it out on Nintendo’s Virtual Console for the Wii, Wii U and 3DS. Limited Run Games released a modern replica of the original NES cart, but sadly both it and the original game have become quite expensive on the collectibles market. Your best bet is probably to play it through an emulator, and if you find it too easy, the Japanese edition of Final Mission is a great way to play the game in the equivalent of hard mode, as it’s significantly more difficult, has a slightly darker story (which can be patched in through a fan translation) and has a different order for the levels.

(And if you find the game too challenging, there are also cheat codes to skip to your preferred level!)

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

IN SHORT: Is a weird ‘em up shooter a thing? Psychosis would definitely fit the bill.

RELEASE DATE: 1990

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: KLON (also known as Dual) / Naxat Soft / NEC

BEST VERSIONS: TurboGrafx-16

I was on the fence about whether or not I ought to include the TurboGrafx-16’s weirdest shoot ‘em up, Psychosis (more appropriately named Paranoia in its Japanese release), in detail in this series when a simple summary might suffice. But after playing it again, I concluded that yes, this is definitely a game that merits some discussion because it’s a game that has some layers that go beyond its immediately obvious oddball qualities.

Psychosis is an R-Type-style scrolling shoot ‘em up where your ship can quickly be equipped with two invulnerable satellite pods that can be used to help defend you against the game’s rather aggressive enemies. The gimmick is that these pods can be positioned by your movements when you pull backwards or forwards or push the first button, and this is especially helpful once they gain one of three firing modes: a diagonal green laser that shoots at about a 30 degree angle on either side of your ship, a forward fireball-style shot or a lightning shield that will protrude from two sides of each orb, allowing you to ram into enemies and destroy them. Your own ship is equipped with a rather pitiful Vulcan cannon, so using these pods effectively is key to your survival. You can also occasionally find an energy shield to give your ship some extra protection or a speed-up powerup.

The game’s five levels only take about 15-20 minutes to run through, and while they’re moderately challenging, the need for some memorization to get past hazards is probably the biggest hurdle to get over. Fortunately, Psychosis is slow-moving, and the game’s manual even encourages you to pause the game rapidly to slow the action down if you get stuck.

The main attraction to this game is not really the mechanics, though; it’s the theme, which is posed as psychological horror as a creature called the Devil Ugar imprisons your soul in the evil corners of your own mind. Reading the Japanese manual, I saw roughly the same story, though Ugar’s name was rendered as “Ugly” by my software. I can’t help but wonder if something got lost in translation and the game is actually about coming back from the dead, given that the levels (called Causes in this game) have titles like “The Entrance to the Underworlds” and “The Gardens of the Dead” and “The Resting Place.” The ending also has you rising into the clouds, suggesting a heavenly fate.

But whatever the case may be, the Devil Ugar appears between stages with an impish grin and a beckoning finger, encouraging you to “come on” to fight him. In the Japanese version, he’s actually a bit nastier by extending the middle finger and shouting something that sounds like an expletive, but the idea is roughly the same – if you want to end your torment, you’ll need to defeat Ugar by making it through each Cause and taking him down.

Beyond the Devil Ugar, there are some very weird and often nightmarish enemies to fight, many of which resemble insects and spiny sea creatures, but some of which are clear mythological or religious characters like an evil Hannya mask or a Ganesha-like elephant foe. The bosses follow a similar pattern. The first stage’s boss is a horned eyeball that moves around in a tornado. Two stages feature bosses drawn from mythology – a nine-tailed fox and a multi-armed Hindu goddess. And the third stage’s boss defies description, really – it’s a weird creature that crawls along the right wall shooting at you while two orifices move across the upper and lower regions and try to stab you with knives. The Devil Ugar himself is a giant cybernetic head that shoots its faceplate at you.

Because the game’s so short, it’s necessarily to play it twice if you want to see the so-called “good” ending. I don’t personally feel it’s worth the effort since it just includes one extra text screen seemingly alluding to Naxat Soft’s Alien Crush, but it is an option in the North American version of the game.

While Psychosis is generally considered one of the better original games for the TurboGrafx-16 and was even included in the miniconsole, it’s not worth the collector’s prices you’ll pay to find a legitimate copy. The Japanese version for the PC Engine, Paranoia, is often much cheaper and is almost identical in gameplay beyond levels two and three being flipped around. Otherwise, locate a game ROM and play it on your favorite emulator, because the chances of this game getting an official re-release are low now that Konami owns the rights to it.

One more piece of interesting trivia: Dual also worked on the second Air Zonk game and it’s also quite a weird and interesting shoot ‘em up, and possibly more accessible to many modern players. Their 1991 Japan-only PC Engine CD-ROM² game L-DIS is also interesting since it too is a cute but weird game, though it’s very difficult and definitely not something casual players will enjoy.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

We’re going to talk about all sorts of point and click adventure games from the 1990s that weren’t published by Sierra, including Spellcasting, Death Gate, Simon the Sorcerer, The Space Bar, Elvira, Return of the Phantom, Dragonsphere and Star Trek!

I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Get ready for a survey of many of the great adventure games you may have played, may have heard of … or may have missed!

One of the things you might have realized about me by now is that I don’t like to leave stones uncovered when we’re talking about a topic like adventure gaming – there are just too many great games to mention and so many of them have gone unnoticed over time. I really don’t want you to miss out on experiences that might become your next favorite game from the retro era!

But we’ve also reached a point in our discussion where if I try to be comprehensive with all of the point and click adventure games released in the 1990s, we’ll never get to talking about other genres. Even so, there’s a lot of ground to cover.

And so in this episode and the next one, I’m going to intentionally keep our discussion limited to the point and click adventure games I think are most notable or which hold up the best today, and I’m also going to save most of the Myst-style adventures, 3D games and full motion video games for their own episode.

So, please forgive me if I don’t bring up one of your favorites or if I just mention in passing, because there’s really so much ground to cover!

But to kick us off I need to devote some time in this episode to talk about Steve Meretzky, the legendary text-based adventure game developer behind the classic 1980s Infocom games Planetfall, Stationfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Sorcerer and, along with Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

But by 1990, Steve Meretzky had made the transition to a company called Legend Entertainment, a publisher founded by Infocom veterans Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989. Neither of these guys had actually worked for Infocom; both were contractors with their own companies, and they’d worked together on the Infocom-published titles Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels and Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur in the 1980s.

They were supposed to work on a third game about Robin Hood, but Infocom was shut down by its new parent, Activision, before that could happen.

Bob Bates had a chance to work on a video game tie-in for James Cameron’s feature film The Abyss around this time, though it fell through, and Mike Verdu’s company was providing software for the US Department of Defense in addition to renting out programmers as contract workers for software development.

In their time working with Infocom, they got to know many of the implementors there, including Steve Meretzky. When Infocom collapsed, they saw an opportunity to carry on the text-based adventuring tradition, albeit with some newer technology.

And these games also occupied an interesting middle ground between traditional text-based adventuring and the more popular graphical adventures Sierra and LucasArts were publishing. Like Maniac Mansion’s SCUMM engine, Legend’s games allowed players to click on commands with a mouse and assemble actions together, and like a graphical adventure game, the image pane had pictures with interactive elements players could click on. By today’s standards, they look rather intimidating due to all the text onscreen, and even then, they were clunky. But the text allowed Legend’s games to go beyond the more distilled storytelling of Sierra and LucasArts’s output of the early 1990s.

But because of all that text, the games needed to have a great hook. Steve Meretzky was brought aboard as a contractor to make a fantasy series similar to Leather Goddesses of Phobos that would have a strong appeal to the older adults who still like text-based adventures, and he started work on what would become a trilogy called Spellcasting.

The first game, 1990’s Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls, featured a cover that basically played on the same tropes the movie Revenge of the Nerds had established in 1984 – a dorky-looking wizard with a pocket protector, big glasses and a pointy hat stands between a buxom cheerleader and a bikini model, both with long blond hair like Farah Fawcett. It’s honestly a little cringey today, but in the 1990s, it was great marketing for a game that was actually quite tame compared to the raunchy humor of Leisure Suit Larry.

But not too tame, because the Spellcasting games do allow you to turn on a naughty mode and get some more explicit language and opportunities for hooking up than you’d see in normal mode. And unlike Leisure Suit Larry, the girls in the game aren’t just there to mostly tease you – they are quite willing to head into the bedroom, though the games generally just note that they did and the action scores you some points without much description of what happens.

The Spellcasting series has the sensibilities of an 80s college frat boy movie combined with the fantasy of being an up and coming wizard named Ernie Eaglebeak at Sorcerer University who also has to face challenges and foes and occasional fantasy creatures. It’s essentially Harry Potter Goes to College and Gets Laid Repeatedly, but released years before those books even existed. You even have a rival sorcerer, the evil Joey Rottenwood, who happens to be your stepfather.

Rather than try to explain the plot of the games, I’ll just summarize them. Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls came out in 1990 and covers the setup: you’re a horny young man lusting after your voluptuous neighbor, Lola Tigerbunny, and you enroll in Sorcerer University to impress her, but spend much of the game going to parties and then, when tragedy strikes, getting involved with a plot about saving the school and stopping a bad guy.

In Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer’s Appliance, released in 1991, you decide to join a frat in your sophomore year and spend the first part of the game getting hazed and the second part of the game navigating another tragedy as the school’s president dies of shock due to the lascivious behavior of his wife and you have to uncover the secrets of the Sorcerer’s Appliance, the first game’s MacGuffin, in order to defeat this game’s pair of villains. This game is significantly longer than the first, but also a lot more focused on the plot this time around.

In Spellcasting 301: Spring Break, released in 1992, you and your frat brothers ride your magic carpet to the beach at Point Blather and party, only to find your rival frat from another college, the St. Weinersburg Academy of Magic, already there, and your frat has to defeat them in several contests, including bullfighting. This is important because the final chapter in the game involves tracking down a mythical Prokturingham Bull that terrorizes Point Blather every 89 years. You have to bring back its head but discover the game’s hidden villain has other plans for the bull. A fourth chapter is promised at the end of this game, but it never happened.

Each of the Spellcasting games is basically written in the form of a novel where the game takes place over days or chapters of the story, depending upon which you’re playing. And the writing is good – Steve Mertezky had a lot of freedom with the Spellcasting series and really seemed to enjoy extending out the ideas of his Infocom game Sorcerer and making it into a bunch of smutty college adventures. But by the standards of the day, these games felt pretty outdated with their text parsers and heavily verbose descriptions, and as time has gone on, their misogynistic attitudes towards women you have to score with to score in the game have also not aged well, so I’m hesitant to recommend them.

Steve Meretzky also made a Leather Goddesses of Phobos sequel for Activision in 1992 called Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!. Unlike the original text-based game or the Spellcasting games, this one’s a true graphical point and click adventure that takes place in a retro-50s setting and you play as a guy named Zeke, a girl named Lydia and an alien named Barth. It’s also a really lousy game that’s focused on showing off a lot of cheesecake but which doesn’t deliver in the story or puzzle department. Worst of all, it’s boring. Don’t waste your time with it.

Steve Meretzky’s odd 1994 adventure game and RPG hybrid Superhero League of Hoboken is probably his crowning achievement at Legend Entertainment, and it has a strong flavor of the same sorts of low-rent, last on the list superheroes you’d see in Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot and Mystery Men comic books. You play as Crimson Tape, leader of the titular team, and your superpower is creating organizational charts, a skill you don’t even get to use in the game. The game is filled with similarly useless heroes like Princess Glovebox, who excels at folding paper maps, Tropical Oil Man, who raises the cholesterol of his enemies, and Captain Excitement, who puts his foes to sleep. The writing is really what makes this game palatable, because the RPG mechanics are pretty weak and the game is very heavy on text with illustrations in a central pane. While it uses a point and click interface for the adventure game elements, you still select verbs from a list or cardinal directions to interact with the game world.

I personally think the game is one of Steve Meretzky’s least funny adventures, far better in premise than execution, and definitely lacking on the RPG side of things. But many players seem to have a strong sense of nostalgia for it, so it’s worth a try to see if it’s your cup of tea!

I’m much more interested in getting people to try The Space Bar, a 1997 comedy adventure game Steve Meretzky created after he stopped contracting for Legend Entertainment and co-founded Boffo Games with Mike Dornbrook and Leo DaCosta. After their first game, the minigame collection Hodj ’n’ Podj, didn’t sell very well, Meretzky turned back to adventure games one last time. Though he served as the game’s director, he worked with a team this time around that included Ron Cobb, a concept artist who worked on many science fiction films, including designing some of the aliens seen in the Mos Eisley cantina scene in the original Star Wars. And thus the premise of The Space Bar is that you’re hanging out with some weird-looking aliens, trying to solve a mystery and locate a shapeshifting killer hiding in the bar The Thirsty Tentacle on the planet of Armpit VI.

As the human detective Alias Node, you have to interrogate the aliens using dialogue trees and a power called Empathy-Telepathy, or emp-tel, that allows you to access the memories of some of the aliens you meet and enter into their worlds. This is definitely one of the neatest ideas of the game, because every alien has different ways of interacting with their memory world and some also see things differently due to their sensory organs. The aliens are really interesting and varied and are rendered in a style that makes them look like something between puppets and claymation creations. These segments are also the most fun part of the game because they’re not constrained by the same draconian timer that makes the main portion of the game so tense.

And that timer really is the main reason The Space Bar is such a polarizing game, because this is the sort of adventure that begs to be explored at a leisurely pace, but it instead requires a lot of trial and error and save scumming because it gives you very little opportunity to deviate from the correct series of actions. In fact, it’s hard to find a walkthrough or even helpful hints for the latter parts of the game because it’s so ridiculously hard to complete – and I myself have never finished it. I had to watch a Let’s Play series by the Youtuber Rocket Baby Dolls LP to see the ending, which shows off the game’s concept art. A link to that playlist is in the show notes.

The best advice I’ve come across is to save often and keep notes about which actions help you move forward so you can make the most of the time. And while I love so many things about this game, I’d welcome a fan patch to make it more accessible.

Sadly, Steve Meretzky took the commercial failure of The Space Bar as a sign he needed to move into making more casual games, and that’s pretty much what he’s done since then. But he wasn’t the only creator at Legend Entertainment.

Timequest is a 1991 game created by Bob Bates, and it’s both a serious adventure game and a far more sophisticated one than any of the Spellcasting games. The premise of the game is that you’re a low-ranking member of the Temporal Corps from the year 2090 AD who is sent back in time to different periods and places to undo ten changes that a rogue officer has made to the timeline, and there are also two more overarching problems you need to correct.

This officer’s name, by the way, is Zeke S. Vettenmyer, which is an anagram for Steven E. Meretzky. I love that little detail.

Your adventures involve many major historical events, like the assassination of Julius Casear, the signing of the Magna Carta or the crowing of Charlemagne, and you can visit six major locations around the world in many different time periods ranging back from 1361 BC all the way to 1940AD, for a total of 55 spacetime locations counting your starting point.

Even better, you can play the game in a fairly nonlinear fashion, but in doing so, you have to follow a rule that once you visit a location, you can only travel forward in time and you can’t revisit an area you’ve already been to… at least until the end of the game, when any pretense of causality gets tossed out the window. So, if you plan to play without a walkthrough, it’s a good idea to visit every location, take lots of notes and what you find, and then restart your game and try to figure out the sequence that allows you to make it through the game.

Fortunately, you don’t need a map; the game creates one for you, and most locations are pretty simple. Unfortunately, the game gives you a lot of inventory items to juggle with no constraints on how much you can carry, and this adds to the complexity of the puzzle-solving.

Timequest is very interesting and it’s fairly well-written, but it’s so ridiculously hard without a hint book or walkthrough that it’s a tough game to recommend to anyone but the most serious adventure gamers out there, particularly since it uses the same text parser and limited graphic user interface seen in Spellcasting. The game’s plot is also full of plot holes and contradictions, like most time travel stories, and I highly recommend the very entertaining GameFAQs walkthrough by an author who simply goes by AMC – it not only tells you how to complete the game but offers a thoughtful and amusing analysis of how stupid the villain’s plan really is.

So, Timequest isn’t for everyone.

But Bob Bates’s next game, 1993’s Eric the Unready, is a far more palatable affair because it’s intended to be a parody of Zork and King’s Quest-style adventures as well as the broader geekdom of fantasy and sci-fi. While the game still uses a text parser with a small pane for graphics, it will occasionally shift into full-screen graphical cutscenes with text popups or dialogue, and there are also minigames like a card game or a trivia contest and an occasional newspaper to read that often contains darkly humorous stories about happenings in the crazy world around you.

If the title didn’t already tip you off, this is a deeply unserious adventure game, and definitely up there with Space Quest and Quest for Glory in its willingness to abandon the story for a humorous tangent that’s really just there to make you laugh.

There are all sorts of characters you’d never expect to appear in the game, like Khan Noonien Singh from Star Trek and the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz and a clan of Killer Attack Turtles.

There’s a sequence where the game basically turns into Zork, and another sequence where you have to pull a sacred banana from a stone to impress some knights. There’s a whole plotline about visiting the Greek gods and finding out they’ve decided to upgrade their temples to be more like tacky Hollywood offices, with Clio running reception and a toga-wearing agent named Morty booking gigs for deities who need something to do. There’s a Fantasy Island parody with an actual Monkey Island where you’ll find a four-headed monkey – that’s one more head that the one Guybrush Threepwood is constantly using as a deflection.

As an adventure Eric the Unready is fairly even-keel. It’s not too challenging, but it does have a few puzzles that push you, especially in the latter sections of the game. The game’s sharp sense of humor and anything-goes sensibilities certainly make it fun. And it even ends with the tease of a sequel by saying, “And so endeth the saga of Sir Eric the Unready – Part I.”

Sadly, Eric never got that sequel, but Bob Bates’s partner and co-founder, Michael Verdu, designed another great adventure for Legend Entertainment released in 1995 called Misson Critical that utilized a far more sophisticated interface with full-motion video and pre-rendered backgrounds as well as a graphical user interface to replace the text parser. It’s a great game, but it’s very much in the style of Myst and really doesn’t fit as well into our discussion here, so we’ll talk more about it when we get to those Myst-style games.

Legend Entertainment also created several games adapted from the works of fantasy and science fiction authors. I’m not going to go into detail on any of these because they are all pretty dependent upon your love for the fiction they’re adapting. For example, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway and Gateway II: Homeworld, which came out in 1992 and 1993, are based on the Heechee saga that was set up in the 1977 novel Gateway, which tells the story about a hollowed-out asteroid that serves as a space station for humans and a source of technology from a long dormant alien race called the Heechee. The saga spans five novels, and I truly recommend these books – they’re quite good!

But the games deviate pretty significantly from the novels, beginning with the basic setup but then establishing their own stories. As illustrated text-based adventures that springboard off a classic hard sci-fi novel series, the Gateway games are decent enough, but your enjoyment of them will go way up if you read the original Frederik Pohl novel first.

Likewise, the 1993 graphical adventure Companions of Xanth, which is based on the Piers Anthony book Demons Don’t Dream, part 16 in his sprawling Xanth fantasy novel series, is mainly going to appeal to fans of the source material who get the jokes and enjoy seeing the characters from the series depicted onscreen. One of the game’s worst ideas is pretending to give you a choice of companions to guide you and then forcing you to use Nada Naga, who’s featured on the box in her half woman, half snake form, but who actually looks like a human female in the game. While this is in line with the plot of the novel, it makes the game feel small and linear by comparison. The voice acting is also really spotty, as is the use of digitized graphics in sections to portray the characters from the non-magical realm of Mundania.

I read every one of the Xanth books available as a teenager – he’s almost reached 50 of at this point! - but I never really enjoyed this game. As it happens, Piers Anthony had a 1993 book about video games called Kilobyte that would have made a far better adventure game, and I also think some of his other more popular books, such as the Incarnations of Immortality novels or the Apprentice Adept series, would have been better-suited to a video game adaptation than Xanth.

Speaking of other fantasy novels, Death Gate is a 1994 adaptation of the seven-part fantasy series The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, who are also quite famously the authors of the original Dragonlance novels upon which many games have been based.

Of all the Legend Entertainment adventures, it’s also by far my favorite, and probably the one where it’s least necessary to be familiar with the novel it’s based upon. The premise is that you’re Haplo, a member of a race called the Patryns who were banished to a land called the Labyrinth when the world was broken thousands of years ago by the evil Sartans, and you have to find the pieces of the world seal to break the power of the Death Gate and make the world whole again.

The adventure is lengthy and text-heavy, but it’s controlled similarly to the adventure segments of Superhero League of Hoboken with a compass for movement and a list of verbs and an inventory panel, quite similar to a Sierra SCI1 or SCUMM engine games if they were in the first person perspective. Since the story has so many fantasy terms and strange names, voice acting helps to make the story more understandable, and fortunately, the voice acting is also quite improved in Death Gate, and used during the game’s extensive dialogue trees to bring characters to life.

Though Death Gate might look like an RPG, it’s a pure adventure game from start to finish. The puzzles aren’t super challenging and often rely on object utilization, but they are well-designed and put up an occasional challenge without making the game feel impossible.

I’m less impressed by Shannara, a 1995 fantasy adventure based on the novels by Terry Brooks and created by Corey and Lori Ann Cole, the creators of Quest for Glory. Josh Mandel, who also worked at Sierra and had just departed while working on Space Quest 6, was a writer on this game as well. This story actually takes place between the novels The Sword of Shannara and The Elfstones of Shannara, and you play as Jak, the son of Shea Ohmsford from the original novel and father of Wil from the second one.

The problem with Shannara is that the game is trying to follow a similar design template to the Coles’ Sierra games, but it doesn’t work quite so well in Legend’s engine because the gameplay takes place in the first person and the combat and overworld travel sequences are just terrible. The adventure game portion of Shannara is fine, but it’s also sort of generic, lacking the spark of Terry Brooks’s novels and the humor of the Coles’ earlier games. I’d like to say this one’s a hidden gem, but it’s really not; it’s definitely just a mediocre game that occasionally rises above its station before sinking right back down to it. Keep in mind that in 1995, role-playing games had already significantly surpassed many of the technological hurdles Shannara was facing and had far more compelling stories and mechanics.

A far better game is Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, a 1997 adventure game from Josh Mandel, this time as a designer. It’s also based on a novel, this time a 1977 book of the same name by Spider Robinson that spawned a longer series, and Josh Mandel managed to persuade Robinson to get more and more involved in consulting on this game to make it something fans of the novels would enjoy, and Robinson even wrote and performed some songs for the game.

It wasn’t a commercial success, but it’s one heck of an adventure game, still following the Legend Entertainment model of a central graphic pane above an inventory bar and text scroll, but movement is handled by panning around environments on the top half of the screen and clicking on doorways rather than using a compass, and the cursor is context-sensitive. The game’s also quite dialogue-heavy, featuring wonderful characters – even a talking dog! - and great voice acting to accompany Jake Stonebender’s journeys through six wild adventures spanning cities, ruins, rainforests, a satellite in space and even a bizarre aurora borealis-tinged simulated universe.

And of course every adventure includes plenty of time spent in Callahan’s Place, the bar run by Mike Callahan that attracts all sorts of misfits from other worlds, dimensions, fictional universes and timelines.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon was mismarketed as being a Western game in the style of Josh Mandel’s earlier co-creation, Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, but it’s a much different sort of game more in the style of the modern Disco Elysium. You definitely need to play this one – it’s absolutely fantastic! While you’re at it, read the broader series of Callahan’s Place books as well.

The 1998 adventure John Saul’s Blackstone Chronicles: An Adventure in Terror is based on a horror novel series spanning six books, and the game is actually its seventh chapter, starring series protagonist Oliver Metcalf in the town of Blackstone, which is home to a haunted asylum. This game is much more in the vein of Myst or The 7th Guest, with full screen pre-rendered video graphics making it feel like you’re playing a 3D game with many spirits to talk to. There are no inventory wheels, verbs or compass icons to help you interact with the game world; you instead have a context-sensitive cursor.

While this all sounds like the makings of a pretty big disaster for a company that tended to be behind the curve technologically in the adventure game experiences it offered, Blackstone Chronicles is actually a pretty decent and overlooked game. It’s spooky and has a story worth experiencing, and it’s also well-designed as an adventure, with puzzles that are fun but not overly frustrating and narration that helps you along. Surprisingly, John Saul seems to have had little to do with this game; Bob Bates wrote the story and designed the game, and Mike Verdu served as executive producer.

That unfortunately brings us to the end of Legend Entertainment’s adventure games, as the studio largely moved on to first person action games powered by the Unreal Engine like The Wheel of Time and Unreal II: The Awakening before shutting down in 2004. While they’ll never be quite as well-regarded as Infocom, Sierra or LucasArts, they were among the last bastions of traditional adventure gaming in the 1990s, and victim to the same commercial pressures to get out of that business as everyone else.

But Legend Entertainment wasn’t the only game in town when it came to adventure gaming, and one studio that managed to produce a big hit was Interplay, who managed to find a way to allow adventure gamers to boldly go where several games had not so impressively gone before!

Star Trek has a long history with gaming going back to the early 1970s when it inspired many mainframe computer games, but as official Star Trek games go, the 1980s was kind of a bust where the official license was concerned. Sure, you have the 1982 Sega arcade game and the Vectrex’s surprisingly good Star Trek: The Motion Picture space combat sim, most of the best Star Trek games were actually retooled into original IPs, generally for strategy and role-playing games.

Computer gamers did get a few releases, though – the lousy text adventures Star Trek: The Kobayahsi Alternative and The Promethean Prophecy, the pretty good Mike Singleton strategy adventure Star Trek: The Rebel Universe and the halfway decent illustrated text adventure Star Trek: First Contact, which centers on making covert First Contact with a planet called Gothica and has nothing to do with the later Next Generation movie about the Borg.

There’s also the sort-of-space sim Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which is held back by being based on one of the worst movies in the franchise, and Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Transinium Challenge, an obscure 1989 tie-in to the show’s first and second seasons that uses a graphical interface and digitized character portraits, but has you play as Commander Riker because Captain Picard decides he needs more training.

Some of these games are interesting, but none of them is really great.

And then Interplay got its shot in 1992, resulting in a true point and click adventure game that’s structured to provide players with new episodes of the classic show. It’s known as Star Trek 25^th Anniversary, a name it shares with far less impressive and unrelated NES and Game Boy games released the same year. But it has one thing almost no other Star Trek game has – a 1993 CD-ROM talkie edition where most of the original cast returned to voice the characters.

I cannot emphasize enough how much the voice acting adds to the game, because unlike the movies, which often felt quite different from the original show, this game and its 1993 sequel, Star Trek: Judgement Rites, already felt like a true continuation of the original series, with the same sorts of self-contained plots, puzzles to solve and conflicts to resolve along with occasional ship to ship combat sequences aboard the Enterprise. Adding in the original cast to read those lines made an already excellent adventure gaming series feel truly authentic, even if the cast tended to read the lines flat and don’t always quite sound like the television versions of the characters since the actors were so much older.

The gameplay in each game generally involves either being on the bridge of the Enterprise, where Captain Kirk can give orders to the crew, or beaming to each chapter’s locale with an away team, often represented by a small area with a few screens and some puzzles to solve to advance the plot. The character interactions are by far the best thing about these games, and if you enjoy hearing Dr. McCoy and Spock bickering or Captain Kirk taking charge in unwinnable situations, you’ll have a great time playing through these games.

As point and click adventure games go, Interplay’s Star Trek games felt a little behind the more stylized games Sierra and LucasArts were producing at the time, and they’re known for being a little too easy as far as puzzle solving goes. Their audience was never hardcore adventure game fans, however, and aside from the fact that the ship combat sequences are mandatory, both games were quite popular with casual players, and the CD-ROM editions with voice-acted lines justified being a multimedia early adopter during a time when many DOS-driven desktop computers still didn’t have sound cards or CD-ROM drives.

But an equally impressive Star Trek game came out in 1995, this time from Spectrum Holobyte. Star Trek: The Next Generation – “A Final Unity” is a point and click adventure game that includes rendered videos, painted sprites and voices sourced from the actual actors from the TV show. While it’s not perfect, it truly looks and feels like an extension of the show so well that it’s portrayed as an episode within the seventh season of the series, and it’s definitely as well-written and engaging to play through.

Much like Star Trek 25^th Anniversary, the game shifts between Bridge interactions and Away Team missions, and there are occasional strategy and combat sequences that are far weaker than the actual adventuring and puzzle solving. You can also visit engineering or the holodeck, though you sadly can’t do anything fun in the latter like catch Lieutenant Barclay making out with a simulation of Deanna Troi or accidentally set Professor Moriarty loose on the ship.

Even so, this game’s great if you’re a Star Trek fan, and also a bit more challenging than Interplay’s adventures. Most of the Star Trek games that followed this one were either full motion video games, action games or space combat simulators, so it’s really the last true point and click adventure game for the franchise.

Another intellectual property that received some adventure games in the early 1990s came from Horror Soft, who’d originally created the well-regarded 1989 horror adventure game Personal Nightmare and then got the rights to create two horror-themed adventures featuring Cassandra Petersen’s sexy TV hostess Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. All of these games were designed under the direction of Horror Soft’s owner, Mike Woodroffe, a name we’ll be hearing again a little later in this episode.

By the way, if you remember our discussion several episodes ago about Adventure International’s UK branch that employed Brian Howarth to port Scott Adams’s text-based adventures to other platforms, Mike Woodroffe was the owner of the UK side of the business and eventually changed its named to Adventuresoft UK when Adventure International went bankrupt and then again to Horror Soft to reflect a change in focus towards more mature themes.

The Elvira games play like first-person point and click adventure games with some RPG elements and combat, but what’s most impressive about them is that both were released for the Commodore 64 as well as DOS, Amiga and Atari ST formats, which made them far more accessible to gamers of the early 1990s. Given that the other versions all feature digitized graphics, the 8-bit conversions are actually quite good with a more limited palette and constrained resolution.

Both the 1990 Elvira, which involves wandering around a castle searching for a way to free the mistress of the dark from the evil Lady Emelda, and the 1991 Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus, which takes place in a demon-infested movie studio, are appropriately spooky and filled with monsters to battle and horrors to uncover. The second game is far longer than the first and also involves enormous mazes that are difficult to navigate, requiring you to take the time to map them out in classic CRPG style.

Horror Soft also released another 1992 RPG-style adventure through Accolade that didn’t use the Elvira license, but which does involve time travel as you wander around a wax museum. This game, WaxWorks, is today considered a classic horror computer game, though at the time, it wasn’t regarded quite so well. Part of that might be because it’s extremely gory, far more so than the already disturbing Elvira games, but also because the gameplay is quite challenging. It also was only available on DOS and Amiga systems, which limited its audience, particularly in the UK.

While Horror Soft and its North American publisher Accolade were courting mature audiences with blood, guts and gore, MicroProse was going for sleaze with Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender, a science fiction point and click adventure game where you visit a planet of technologically advanced women called Keepers who can alter their gender to become men and impregnate women they call Stock who live aboveground in primitive dwellings. As the only actual man on the planet, you’re of course going to evoke some passionate feelings, one way or the other.

The game was marketed to sound like a Leisure Suit Larry meets Space Quest IV, but in reality… it’s not nearly as funny or interesting as either of those series, and the voice acting is atrocious. It’s actually more like Leather Goddesses of Phobos in that it’s a big tease that doesn’t really take its premise far enough. But I don’t want to suggest it’s a bad game, because it’s not. The puzzles are fine, the dialogue is at least amusing and the game is long enough to feel substantial without overstaying its welcome.

MicroProse released two other games using the same engine, 1993’s Return of the Phantom and 1994’S Dragonsphere. I actually like both of these games much better than Rex Nebular, though Return of the Phantom wins a lot of points because I love the 1910 Gaston Leroux novel The Phantom of the Opera and the 1980s Andrew Lloyd Weber musical adaptation of it.

The game does too, and its take on the story is to start out in the then-present day of the 1990s where a situation quite similar to the events of the novel is taking place at the Paris Opera House, which is staging an opera called Don Juan Triumphant. Unfortunately, a chandelier falls on the audience and the Opera House’s Ghost is blamed for it. An investigator named Raoul Montand gets too close to the case and discovers the Phantom, who shoves him off a catwalk.

For reasons never really explained, Raoul goes back to 1881 and experiences the actual events of the novel, where the Phantom of the Opera, an escaped sociopathic sideshow feature named Erik, kidnaps a girl named Christine Daae and Raoul, now mistaken for the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, has to locate Erik’s lair and free her.

I won’t defend this game as being great – Raoul is very slow whenever he’s moving, the characters are very chatty but poorly voiced, and the story doesn’t really make a lot of sense due to the time travel nonsense, something which was maybe intended to distinguish this story from other adaptations of the novel, or maybe which made sense from a design point of view to give the player more information about the Phantom.

Even so, if you’re a fan of the story like I am, there’s something wonderful about getting to play a Phantom of the Opera adventure game, and it does have some nice visuals and interesting moments, including the Phantom’s diabolical labyrinth and the duel on the famous chandelier.

Dragonsphere, on the other hand, is an adventure game I’d recommend to anyone. It’s become something of a cult classic today, but when it debuted in 1994, it was amazingly overlooked despite playing very much like a King’s Quest-style fantasy adventure game with a SCUMM-style interface with clickable verbs and an inventory pane. The premise of the game is that you’re a newly-crowned young king named Callash who is trying to find a way to stop the return of the sorcerer Sanwe, who’s imprisoned in his tower by a magical trap called the Dragonsphere. Sanwe and Callash are destined to duel as Sanwe’s powers return, and Callash ventures out and attempts to gain the support of the rulers of nearby realms, with all of them knowing his showdown with Sanwe is near.

And then the game throws you an incredible, unguessable curveball I won’t spoil, but will instead say makes the final act of the game change dramatically as the whole purpose behind your quest changes. And this is part of what makes Dragonsphere such a cult classic – its seeming King’s Quest-style story is a little sharper than it first appears.

As an adventure game, it’s also a lot of fun. Though the voice acting isn’t great, the characters are interesting and some attempt was made to use effects to at least convey a sense of otherness when you encounter the different races of the kingdom. The graphics look very much like King’s Quest V’s painted backgrounds and animated sprites, and the introductory cinematic at the beginning does a great job of setting the story in motion.

Dragonsphere also has a lot in common with another game from around the same time period, Adventure Soft’s Simon the Sorcerer, which was released in 1993 through Activision and which features a similar fusion of King’s Quest-style fairy tale fantasy and a SCUMM-style interface along with a wicked sense of humor that will appeal to anyone who loves the LucasArts games of the era. There’s also a 1995 sequel that takes the premise in even wilder directions.

Oh, and just a fun aside here – Adventure Soft was formerly known as Horror Soft. So yes, this is the same developer that created the Elvira games and WaxWorks, though the game is very different in sensibilities.

The first game is about a 12-year-old boy named Simon who receives a magical spellbook for his birthday, and then one night reads a spell from it and opens a portal to another world. He finds himself in a fantasy land where he’s asked to help rescue a wizard named Calypso, but much like Guybrush Threepwood in the Monkey Island games trying to be a mighty pirate, Simon is a wannabe wizard who has to convince the other wizards in the village to take him seriously by completing arbitrary quests.

Aside from LucasArts, the game’s other clear inspiration is Terry Pratchett, and Simon the Sorcerer feels a lot like the later Discworld games by Teeny Weeny Games and Perfect 10 Productions, right down the distinct British sensibilities. In the talkie edition, Simon’s voiced by Red Dwarf’s Chris Barrie and the cast is mostly made up of British actors who do a great job of bringing the characters to life. This is a very high-quality adventure with great graphics, laugh out loud humor and a number of truly memorable moments.

Unfortunately, Simon the Sorcerer II: The Lion, the Wizard and the Wardrobe, isn’t quite as inspired. While the original game was designed by Mike Woodroffe and written by his son, who actually is named Simon, Mike Woodroffe took more of a managerial role in the second game and Simon Woodroffe took over on game design. The sequel’s Simon’s supposed to be older, and so Brian Bowles provided his voice for this one, but he doesn’t quite have the same mildly annoyed charm that Chris Barrie brought to the role and honestly sounds too old for a teenager. Simon also comes across as being a bit of a jerk at times, which again is a little jarring.

The sequel’s still very funny, but the puzzles aren’t quite as good and the story’s kind of all over the place. Fans of the first game will enjoy the second, but definitely play the first one first.

The series was successful enough to spawn a 2002 sequel called *sigh* Simon the Sorcerer 3D made by the Woodroffe’s side project development studio, Headfirst Productions, and it’s pretty widely loathed. There’s also a fourth and fifth chapter from 2007 and 2009 that was produced by the German developer Silver Style Entertainment, and most Simon fans consider them both the equivalent of fan games. A sixth chapter was planned by an Irish developer called StoryBeasts with Chris Barrie back onboard, but it never happened.

Interestingly, Smallthing Studios S.r.l. just released a new game in 2025 called Simon the Sorcerer: Origins that retcons the original story and has Chris Barrie return to voice the character. Though it’s not perfect, it’s pretty and well-animated, and it’s far closer in spirit to the first two games.

But going back to the 1990s, one more game I want to talk about from Adventure Soft is The Feeble Files, a 1997 science fiction point and click adventure by Mike and Simon Woodroffe and starring Robert Llewellyn – Kryten in Red Dwarf – in the starring role as Feeble, an alien whose job is to burn crop circles in Earth’s farm fields before an encounter with the Voyager space probe makes him aware of the Freedom Fighters who are struggling against the Big Brother-like OmniBrain – and yes, The Feeble Files has some heavy dystopian overtones and inspiration from George Orwell’s novel 1984.

The game’s something of a hidden gem today and was marketed terribly at the time – the box art isn’t very appealing, the back of the box did a terrible job of explaining what the game was about and the in-game graphics, which feature lots of polygonal 3D aliens, are a little off-putting since the characters aren’t particularly cute or charismatic. The voice acting is also spotty in many places due to some odd choices made by the mostly British cast.

But what The Feeble Files delivers is a great adventure with some challenging puzzles that actually worth scratching your head to solve. It’s not a game I’d recommend to everyone, but it is an interesting one that’s enjoyable enough if you need a challenge or don’t mind using a walkthrough.

We’ve talked about a couple of series of games about young wizards in training already, but one point and click series we have not yet mentioned is Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, a 1995 point and click adventure by Perfect 10 Productions and Teeny Weeny Games and published by Psygnosis.

And this was not Psygnosis’s first foray into adventure gaming – they’d already published the very British 1993 Space Quest IV-style adventure game Innocent Until Caught by the developer Divide By Zero and its 1995 sequel Guilty and they’d later publish a 3D adventure called The City of Lost Children in 1997 that we’ll discuss when we get to that style of game.

Both Innocent Until Caught and Guilty are fairly average point and click adventures that try to spice up their adventuring with some humor that doesn’t really land too well and some sleaze in the first game that involves a scene set in a brother. They’re worth checking out if you enjoy the genre, but the second game is the only one that has any voice acting, and it’s pretty spotty in quality.

Divide by Zero also created two other adventures that are similarly obscure, though they do have some interesting moments. One is a 1995 science fiction game called The Orion Conspiracy, and it’s sort of an Alien or Aliens style adventure with shapeshifting aliens that have to be hunted down Among Us style. It’s rather infamous for its bad writing, long cutscenes and heavy use of profanity and homophobic slurs, so I’d recommend playing it with caution.

Divide By Zero’s other adventure, a 1996 cel-animated style point and click game called The Gene Machine, is actually a far better game and quite underrated. It’s what we’d today called a steampunk-style game, clearly inspired by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and set in the Victorian era. There’s a talking cat, which might make you think it’s for children, but like Innocent Until Caught, there is a scene in a brothel. Generally speaking, however, the writing’s more family-friendly. The voice acting is also far more consistent and helps deliver the dry, British wit that fuels the humor. There are even some laugh out loud moments amidst some standard icon-driven graphical adventuring.

If you get a chance to try The Gene Machine, you really should. It really surprised me when I checked it out, particularly since it was published by Vik Tokai, a publisher that was known for some really lousy computer games including the absolutely awful Western-themed graphical adventure Silverload.

But we were talking about Psygnosis and the Discworld adventure games, and let me first say that if you’re not familiar with the source material by Sir Terry Pratchett, you really should read the novels The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, which are not only the initial novels in the long-running series, but also your introduction to Rincewind, the game’s main character, who is here voiced by Eric Idle. The Discworld is a planet sized disc being help up by four elephants riding a giant turtle that’s flying through space, and it’s filled with all sorts of fantasy creatures and evokes many familiar tropes. Most of the stories take place in a city on that Disc called Ankh-Morpok which is filled with a vast cast of characters who appear in multiple stories and who sometimes parody celebrities in the real world or in literature.

The original Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, stars the wizard Rincewind and was adapted into a text-based adventure game in 1986 by Delta 4 and Pirahna Software. It’s notable for being a badly-made game that cleaves too closely to the book but still manages to be incredibly hard.

The 1995 game, by contrast, is depicted in an animated cartoon style that really helps to sell the humor. The plot itself is not based on one of Rincewind’s normal adventures, but instead mostly upon the eighth Discworld novel, Guards! Guards!, about a group of characters called the City Watch who have to foil an evil plot to install a puppet king by summoning a dragon that provides a pretense for getting rid of the lawful ruler, the Patrician of the city of Ankh-Morpork. The dragon causes a lot of problems, though, and someone has to figure out how to stop it when it proves to be uncontrollable even by those who summoned it.

Rincewind’s insert into this story works pretty well because the game adds in other familiar characters like the walking Luggage that follows Rincewind like a puppy as well as The Librarian and Death, who show up in a lot of Discworld books. The writing is very sharp and voiced extremely well, and the animation style is quite fluid with lavishly illustrated artwork despite the game’s limited resolution and 256-color palette. My only real complaint is that the game can be incredibly obtuse in places, and even being familiar with the source material doesn’t always make it clear what you’re supposed to do next. It’s best-played with a walkthrough, and since it’s also available on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn, it’s pretty accessible, though I would definitely recommend the DOS or Amiga version since they both use a mouse.

The 1996 sequel Discworld II is known in Europe by the subtitle Missing Presumed… !? and in North America as Mortality Bytes!, and it is a far more impressive-looking game with a cel-shaded animation style and Super VGA graphics. Imagine the difference between Monkey Island 2 and The Curse of Monkey Island and you’ll get the difference here – the dour look on Rincewind’s face is far easier to see since there aren’t as many pixels obscuring things and the game’s screens and scenes are more capable of showcasing different angles and perspectives to make things more visually interesting.

The game’s also significantly longer, but also easier, this time drawing on the novels Moving Pictures and Reaper Man and having Rincewind investigate why Death’s gone on holiday and using a movie to draw the Grim Reaper out of hiding. The game’s quite aware of how irreverent it is and even includes a song written and sung by Eric Idle called “That’s Death” and later includes “gratuitous 3D scene” near the end to poke fun at how every game was doing those back then. Thankfully, it reverts back to the animated style, which holds up way better today anyhow.

The first two Discworld games are truly excellent and are well worth playing today. But there is a third one as well called Discworld Noir that came out in 1999 that abandons Rincewind as a protagonist and plays more like a detective story with a main character named Lewton who was once part of the City Watch in Ankh-Morpok.

While the game is very good – and probably longer than the first two games combined! – it’s such a shift in graphics and style that it really feels like something else entirely. Instead of the lavish animated style of the second game, this one features pre-rendered scenes and characters and abandons objects and inventory puzzles in favor of clues Lewton collects in his notebook. The tone is also quite different, with a darker look and feel, and the story eventually turns into a sort of cultish cosmic horror tale, which is quite distinct from the sillier style of the early games. Even though Terry Pratchett came up with the story and contributed some of the dialogue, I wouldn’t describe the game as feeling like it has his fingerprints on it so much as the inspiration of his humor and characters.

Lewton’s turn as the protagonist also seems like an odd choice since Rob Brydon, who voices the character, feels far less comfortable with the role than Eric Idle did as Rincewind despite being a well-established comic actor in his own right. Rounding out the voice cast are Kate Robbins, who voices female characters in all three games, Robert Llewelyn of Red Dwarf fame and The Young One’s Nigel Planer, who’s also known for reading Discworld audiobooks and was even in the television adaptations of some of the Discworld novels.

But for all those critiques, Discworld Noir can stand on its own as a legitimately decent adventure game with a lot of gameplay to offer. It can be long-winded and isn’t as visually engaging during all that talking, but it’s well-written and the clues system makes the game far more accessible than many adventure games of the era, anticipating some of the changes that were coming to the genre in the next decade as adventure gaming largely shifted to 3D.

And now that we’ve covered the Discworld games, we’ve also reached a great stopping point. In our next episode, we’ll talk about some other point and click adventure games like The Legend of Kyrandia, Beneath a Steel Sky, Dark Seed, Call of Cthulhu, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Dune, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, Beavis and Butthead and so much more… as well as Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream!

And then after that, we’ve still got to cover multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Under a Killing Moon, Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7^th Guest, The Last Express, Black Dahlia and The Neverhood. And of course we have an obligation to accept Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.

Then we’ll finally close by touching on the 21^st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream. We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!

If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.

And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!

I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRY

Before I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.

This week, I’m recommending Old Skies, a 2025 adventure by Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games that features one of the most interesting and world-weary time travel concepts I’ve ever encountered. The premise of the game is that you are Fia Quinn, a time traveling agent for ChronoZen, a future company that allows people to go back in time and make changes to the timestream… for a price. The result is often that history changes in the process without anyone being aware but the agents, but ChronoZen and its employees ensure that the things that are important to their own existence can’t be changed.

But their present lives can, and Fia might find herself with a spouse and children in one timeline only to have it washed away by someone else’s choices a moment later.

The entire game is excellent and makes great use of its time travel conceit to create fun puzzles and interesting interactions. Fia’s adventures take her to many different times and places, but the standout moment is when Fia has to travel to New York City on September 10^th, 2001 knowing that tomorrow, the city is going to be thrown into chaos and some of the people she meets will die and yet seeing the unsuspecting people of New York just going about their lives as if nothing big is going to happen.

Being a time-traveler, she knows how things are destined to turn out as well. As she winds up uncovering connections between various people and timelines, she’s forced to have to make a drastic choice of her own to preserve the existence of someone she comes to care about.

I highly recommend Old Skies, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys adventure games. The voice acting is fantastic and the writing offers both a serious story and some humorous moments as you spend time growing to care about the game’s characters. It’s not difficult, but it is fun and it even has some neat connections to other Wadjet Eye Games titles and a developer’s commentary mode for those who want to learn how it was made.

It’s normally $20 on Steam, but also available for a discount in many bundles with other great adventure games.

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Season 1, Episode 8: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 6

Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.

You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)

And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!
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Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.

Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)

Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!
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SOURCES:

https://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/168

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564784-timequest/faqs/81243

What happened to Shelley Day: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/waw/press/2005/dec/day.html

The Space Bar Playlist:

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As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

RELEASE DATE: 1990, 1994 and 1995

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Konami

BEST VERSIONS: Arcade (It’s Parodius! From Myth to Laughter and Fantastic Journey), Super Famicom (Chatting Parodius Live!)

It’s fairly common knowledge at this point that Konami’s Parodius arcade games are right up there with Masaya’s Cho Aniki games for being the vanguard for Japanese “bakage” – literally “stupid games” – by being both competent shoot ‘em ups and incredibly silly experiences. But what many gamers outside Japan may not know is that the Parodius series dates back to 1988 and started life on the MSX, not in the arcades, and the game that’s commonly known in the English-speaking world as Parodius (“Parody Gradius”) is actually a sequel originally called Parodius Da! Shinwa kara Owari e which means, roughly translated, It’s Parodius! From Myth to Laugher. (Later editions titled the game Parodius: Non-Sense Fantasy, but this is a far weaker title).

To make matters even more confusing, the third game, often mistaken for the second, was called Gokujo Parodius! ～Kako no Eikō o Motomete～ in Japan (literally: “Gokujo Parodius – Pursuing the Past Glory”) and released in Europe as Fantastic Journey, which almost makes it seem like a separate game. And I’m not even sure what to make of Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius, the fourth game in the series, also known in English by the literal title, Chatting Parodius Live!

Surprisingly, there is a plot connecting all four games, though it’s largely a combination of elements from the Gradius and Twinbee games with some really goofy Octopus puns added in that don’t translate quite as well in English. In the MSX original, a headband-wearing octopus named Tako (and also known as “Mr. Parodius”) is a failed actor and comedian who now aspires to be a software programmer so he can bring joy and peace to the universe. He visits Earth and finds it in sad shape because people are giving up hope in their dreams, but he realizes it’s because of the machinations of the evil Dream Eating Mystic Beast Bug, a tapir-like creature apparently responsible for all the ills of the universe. With the help of his friend Vic Viper (the Gradius ship, now retired and living on Earth) and some friends from other Konami games who are voluntold they’re helping (Penta the Penguin from Antarctic Adventure, Goemon from Ganbare Goemon, the Popolon knight from Knightmare), Tako gets to work defeating Bug.

The second game involves Tako discovering that Bug was merely a lackey for the true enemy: Golgotha Takobee, a Great Octopus who happens to be Tako’s estranged father. Tako grabs his friends Vic Viper, Penta’s son Pentaro and TwinBee (who’s accidentally colored like his twin sister WinBee) and heads out on a magical through locales including Pirate Island, Las Vegas, an amusement park and mystical Japan before rocketing off to Zeo’s Fortress to fight his father, who happens to be stretched out in a formation very similar to the Xaerous Brain, the final boss from Gradius.

The third game has an elderly and wounded Tako dispatch his oldest son, Takosuke, out on a mission to retrieve the “past glory” so he can once again enjoy the good old days before he dies. Takosuke gathers his yellow octopus friend Belial and a bunch of other allies, this time in pairs. Unlike the previous games, the cast not only includes friends from Gradius, Twinbee and Antarctic Adventure, but also some original characters that make roster pretty weird, with rocket-riding bunny showgirls, angelic pigs, sunfish with giant lips and stick men riding paper airplanes. They all off they go on a strange journey to locate the “past glory” that’s being held in a treasure chest by Tako no A-Ko (“Tako’s Cutie”), an alluring pink Octopus with a green eyes, a feathery fan, a gaudy headdress, a veil sporting some giant ruby red lips and an adoring contingent of penguins who worship her. Much like the arcade version of Gradius II’s end-boss Gofer, her giant head takes up most of the screen and she’s a complete pushover. Unfortunately, the treasure she’s guarding isn’t what Tako thought it was, and the ending offers players an explosive surprise.

The fourth game begins with a cinematic picking up immediately after the end of the third game that shows the Parodius crew wiping out half the population of the universe when “past glory” turns out to be a giant bomb that scatters them to the stars. Oops. But this is all a bunch of melodramatic misdirection; the game actually involves Tako’s younger son, Takohiko, getting tricked by Takosuke into going on a quest for the “Phantom Takoyaki.” This game’s object of desire is exclusive dish only made once every 128 years by Bacteriya, a giant octopus chef whose name is a clear play on Gradius III’s Bacterian. Like the third game, it features pairs of characters from various series as well as original Parodius characters, this time with guest narrators who describe the action to fulfill the “chatting” part of the title. And the introduction hints very strongly that once again, the world is in peril because Tako wants something he probably shouldn’t have.

The story continues on into yet another shoot ‘em up (1996’s Sexy Parodius) and a turn-based strategy game (1997’s Paro Wars) and several pachinko games. It’s actually pretty amazing that Konami took this series seriously enough to keep it going for over a decade, but it’s also rather sad that Sexy Parodius was the last proper entry. Comedic games are a relative rarity in almost any genre, and good comedy games that are actually competent and fun to play are ever rarer. Parodius is patterned closely enough after Gradius that it has the chops to be a serious shoot ‘em up where it counts, and for such a silly series, it’s impressive just how challenging the games can be.

But let’s start with the basics. Like the Gradius games, each of the Parodius games features heroes that can be upgraded as you pick up orange power-up items that charge up your power meter at the bottom of the screen. You can manually select which power-ups you want to add to your ship or you can select an automatic mode that will do it for you. The most famous power-up from Gradius, the Option, is of course one of the choices and can be added up to three times, and the game also practically requires you to equip your ship with missiles and a better forward cannon if you want to be effective. Each of the characters has a slightly different style of power-up progression that generally mimics another Konami shooter, so the Vic Viper offers the default style from Gradius in each game with the other characters might approximate the power-ups in Salamander/Life Force, Nemesis or Twinbee… or do something altogether different that’s either drawn from a competing developer’s shoot ‘em up (such as Darius or R-Type) or which simply adds some wild variety to their style of play.

Another system the game appropriates are the floating yellow bells from the TwinBee games, which give you points by default as you collect them in their standard form but which can be shot to change their color and effect upon pickup. Like the TwinBee bells, shooting them knocks them further away and makes them harder to collect, but they play a non-trivial role in helping you to navigate the toughest passages, offering power-ups like laser shields, giant bombs or temporary growth and invincibility.

Each of the Parodius games is structured with a series of interconnected levels that generally start off with an empty starfield that has a few enemies that are easy to pick off to regenerate power-ups and that then shift into something colorful and wild. The enemies are usually strange and seemingly innocuous creatures penguins, bees, chickens, fish, birds, rabbits and cats. Many levels have a midboss that does something bizarre to break up the action and a final boss that may be incredibly challenging or may just sit there and helplessly absorb your shots.

As you might expect, many of the bosses are parodies of those seen in the Gradius series, from the neon-lit, pinball-esque Viva Core (modeled after the Big Core MK I that serves as the persistent end-level boss in Gradius), various Moai head bosses, the umbrella-like Iron Maiden MK III that references the Iron Maiden mid-bosses, and the scantily-clad Chichibinita Rika, a giant indestructible Vegas showgirl that mimics the grabs seen in some of the Gradius games.

And if you like characters in varied states of undress, the Parodius series has always been rather infamous for its risqué humor, from a sumo pig who will snap his mawashi loincloth at you to a gigantic nude woman with a bedsheet draped over her who will blow deadly bubbles at you until you shoot her in the face enough times. In the third game, there’s a giant mermaid boss named Eliza with a skimpy swimsuit top. And a later stage in that game takes the player through a disco nightclub with the promises of skimpy dancing girls (and penguin girls) “all night.” (The 1996 follow-up Sexy Parodius goes even further past the boundaries of good taste by having an actual naked woman at the end of the game squash the villain with her bare bottom.)

Beyond the bizarre characters, colorful visuals, risqué moments and comedic elements, the Parodius games are known for their music, and each soundtrack features a combination of songs from Konami games, classical music arrangements, folktunes, jazz music, patriotic marches and, occasionally, disco. Because the music didn’t need to be written from the ground up, composer Hidenori Maezawa was able to arrange the original game’s soundtrack under a tight deadline, and in Japan, many of these soundtracks were even able to be released on CD since so much of the music was already owned by Konami or in the public domain. That’s not to say these tracks aren’t good, however; many were composed by the Konami Kukeiha Club, which also wrote a lot of the music for the Gradius games.

And there’s one thing the Parodius games are also known for: being surprisingly challenging, particularly in the later stages. The Gradius foundations carry over and it’s very easy to get smacked by an errant piece of the environment or annihilated by a tiny projectile. Of the three mentioned here, It’s Parodius! From Myth to Laughter is definitely the one I struggled with the most, in part because it doesn’t allow for co-op play and has a checkpoint system rather than a continue system to keep you going. That’s not to say these games are anywhere near the maddening level of difficulty of some shoot ‘em ups, but as approachable as they are, they’re still built for hardcore genre fans to enjoy.

As for where to play them, the bad news is that all three are rather difficult to obtain today. The Japanese PSP had a collection called Parodius Portable that contains the second, third, fourth and fifth games, and that’s probably the best way to get them all in one place, though it’s certainly a collector’s market item at this point. European gamers might look for the 1995 release simply titled Parodius for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn, which contains the second and third game, but is also quite expensive to buy secondhand. Various Parodius games were also ported to consoles and handhelds at different points, including a virtual console release of the original Parodius for the Wii and Wii U, releases of It’s Parodius! From Myth to Laughter on the Game Boy, Famicom, Super Famicom and PC Engine and a release of Chatting Parodius Live! upgrading its original Super Famicom version to a 1996 Sega Saturn and PlayStation version subtitled, “Forever With Me.” It, too, is hard to find without paying absurd collector’s market prices. To make matters worse, various versions have different bosses and challenge levels, meaning the Parodius completionist really needs to have all of the games in all of their editions to get the full experience.

Sadly, the best way to play this series for now is to emulate it with the appropriate ROMs. It’d be nice if Konami would give these a proper North American release one day, but given that neither Parodius nor TwinBee has ever had much a foothold outside of Japan and Konami’s declined to release compilations of both series in the past outside their home turf, I wouldn’t count on it being anytime soon.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

RELEASE DATE: 1990 and 1992

DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Compile / Various publishing partners

BEST VERSIONS: Sega Genesis and Sega CD

If you’re like me and you really need a vertically-scrolling shoot ‘em up to feel special and unique to keep your interest, let me just tell you now – M.U.S.H.A. and Robo Aleste are two games that deliver on that promise. Not only are they made by Compile, the excellent developer behind the Power Strike / Aleste games on the Sega Master System, Blazing Lazers on the Turbo-Grafx 16, the Zanac games on the PC and The Guardian Legend on the NES, but they involve mecha flying around in either the far future of 2290 or in the Sengoku period during an alternate period of history. Both are enormous fun, and because they’re so similar mechanically, it’s easiest to just cover them in one write-up rather than two.

M.U.S.H.A. is the first of the two, and in the North American version, the manual reveals that the game’s name is an acronym for “Metallic Uniframe Super Hybrid Armor.” But it’s also the name of the team driving the MUSHA mechanical suits, including the MUSHA Aleste, a prototype which is piloted by Terri, whom the manual describes as the “heroin of this adventure” and also the valedictorian of Air & Space U. She’s joined by a number of characters from around the world, though four unnamed teammates are shot down in the opening scene, leaving Terri to take on the forces of Dire 51, an “Intellicomputer” that has taken over an area known as LaGrange Gamma and which is preparing to take over the solar system.

Curiously, though the story takes place in the future of 2290 in a setting where humanity has spread to the stars, the aesthetic is very heavily influenced by traditional Japanese culture. Some enemies have Noh theater-style masks or look like mythological monsters, and the first stage includes a showdown with a giant pagoda on tank treads. A later stage takes place over a traditional Japanese city built atop railroad tracks in the sky, and some of the mecha seen in the game greatly resemble samurai suits of armor. But the game also has a high-tech aesthetic as well, with lots of metal and turrets and even a battle over a lava flow with a humongous battleship. The look and feel of M.U.S.H.A. is so distinct that the game really stands apart from other shoot ‘em ups of its era – the closest thing I can compare it to is Nichibutsu’s 1986 arcade game UFO Robo Dangar, a shoot ‘em up inspired by giant robot anime.

M.U.S.H.A. is an overhead scrolling shooter and your Aleste mechanical suit – or “Armored Armor” if you prefer the manual’s description – is equipped with forward-firing guns as well as two subsystems. One of these is a powerful backpack weapon that can either provide a powerful Blazing Beam you can trigger with a secondary fire button, a bomb-throwing Vanishing Buster or a spinning blue barrier called a Defensive Detonator. These backpack weapons can be leveled up by collecting more power-ups of the correct color, and they can also be lost when you take a hit.

The other subsystem is a pair of options you can collect which flank your mechanical suit and which can then be rearranged into six different formations to determine how and where they’ll fire. These include standard styles like forward, 3-way forward, 2-way backwards and circling around your Aleste, but there’s also a reverse mode where the options fire opposite of the direction in which you’re moving or a very useful free mode where the options chase down enemies on their own. Options are expendable and can absorb damage, but they’re easily returned by shooting at the frequently-appearing energy pods and collecting the small rectangular power-ups that break loose.

These subsystems may sound complicated, but the real thrill of M.U.S.H.A. is how accessible and fast-moving it is. It’s moderately challenging, but not nearly as punishing as a lot of other shoot ‘em ups, and the big onscreen sprites, the cool environments, the wide variety of enemies and cool effects like lightning flashes that leave silhouettes of the enemies onscreen all combine to create a truly memorable arcade shooter experience. It’s also a solo experience – there’s no co-operative play – but there’s so much going on onscreen that this is the rare shoot ‘em up where a second player would only get in the way. The game’s seven stages go by quick, and the entire experience is about the length of an arcade shoot ‘em up, completable in under an hour. (Those struggling can also employ some cheat codes that work in the midst of play; just pause the game and input them.)

While M.U.S.H.A. was released in Japan in 1990, it was brought to North America by a publisher called Seismic Software in 1991. It was never published in Europe until 2009 as a Wii Virtual Console release. By contrast, Compile’s Robo Aleste came out on the Sega/Mega CD in 1992 in Japan and was published by Atari’s Tengen imprint in 1993 in North America, while Sega itself published the European edition that same year.

Neither game was particularly well-known outside the audience of hardcore shoot ‘em up fans and many reviewers of the day, likely sick to death of the dozens of console shoot ‘em ups available, weren’t too wowed by either title and assigned both very average scores. Today, both games are regarded as being some of the best console shoot ‘em ups of the era, and Robo Aleste is definitely the more unusual of the two because of its completely bonkers idea for a story that takes the action of M.U.S.H.A. and sets it in the Sengoku era of feudal Japan where the mechanical suits take the place of samurai and you are fighting on the side of the Oda clan under the leadership of Nobunaga Oda himself.

While the game is called Robo Aleste in North America, the Japanese title is Dennin Aleste: Nobunaga and His Ninja Force, a slightly more descriptive title for the strange alternate history that shapes the game’s setting. Basically, Japanese history was altered forever when a technologically advanced ship floated ashore of the island of Tae-ga-shima and Japanese engineers were able to uncover its secrets and create flying gunships and armored warriors called the Dennin, which means “Robo Warriors.” This quickly changes the dynamics of the warring states period, leaving two factions: Oda and his allies in the Mino province and six other warlords who’ve joined forces to conquer him. What’s worse, the Oda clan is losing badly. As the ninja Kage, your job is to work with your brethren in the “White Fang” unit to utilize the secret weapon known as the Robo Aleste to turn the tide of the battle and help save the Oda clan from Motonari Mouri, a warlord from the Chugoku region, Yoshimoto Imagawa, who pilots the feared Musha-O (“Warrior King”) suit, and Astaros, an enigmatic woman who’s supplying the anti-Oda contingent with powerful weapons of war.

And if that story sounds complex for a shoot ‘em up, just know that this is just a summary of the surprisingly lengthy introductory sequence that goes into even more detail, read with surprising enthusiasm in an English script that seems like a literal translation of the Japanese original. Beyond the introduction, there are also dialogue boxes and cutscenes, many of which center on the rivalry between Kage and his brother Tetsu, who shows up frequently to challenge Kage with a Dennin of his own construction.

Unlike many games of the era, the voice actors go to great lengths to pronounce Japanese words correctly. For example, Kage is pronounced properly as “Kah-gay” rather than “Cage” and “Aleste” is pronounced “Al-less-ta”, which is not far off from the Japanese pronunciation that sounds more like “Arrest-uh.” The localization team also retained all of the cultural artifacts of the original story, including the idea that Nobunaga Oda is a supernatural and evil entity who needs to be defeated before he seizes both physical and spiritual power of the world. This interpretation plays a surprisingly important role in the ultimate story and helps explain why Astaros and the warlords she’s united with her future technology are so determined to crush the Oda clan.

While the gameplay is quite similar to M.U.S.H.A., the level design is significantly amped up, featuring weather effects, caverns, trains and airships as well as a final stage the manual describes as a “hyperdimensional warp.” The mechanics are also slightly tweaked, combining the option satellites and special weapons and even allowing Kage to fire his options at enemies R-Type style. The third button is now used for speed maneuvers rather than changing formations, and since the game is a little slower, this is a helpful new move, particularly when facing the incredible bosses, which include dragons, turtles, giant mechanical suits and a huge mechanical spider.

Beyond the smooth controls and great graphics, both M.U.S.H.A. and Robo Aleste feature amazingly good soundtracks. M.U.S.H.A.’s soundtrack is composed by Toshiaki Sakoda (who scored several Aleste games for Compile) and makes good use of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive’s sound chip and pulls off some tunes that are exciting and which drive the action forward. Robo Aleste, scored by Puyo Puyo’s Katsumi Tanaka and Satoshi Shimazaki, uses its extra storage space to provide some fantastic recorded tracks.

While both of these games are absolutely worth your time to track down and play, the sad news is that Robo Aleste has never been re-released and is only available for the Sega/Mega CD (though fortunately, collectors have not driven its price up the way they have with other great games from that platform). Without the appropriate hardware, you’ll have to rely on emulation to enjoy this fantastic shooter. M.U.S.H.A., on the other hand, is easily available today on the Nintendo Switch through its Genesis library in the Switch Online + Expansion service.

The rest of the Aleste series tends to be focused on the more conventional “lone ship fighting through scores of bad guys” design and the console releases were brought to English-speaking audiences through games like Power Strike on the Sega Master System and Space Megaforce on the SNES. But one fork of the series we won’t be getting to until a future volume is the GG Aleste series on the Sega Game Gear. Fortunately, these were collected along with the Master System games in Aleste Collection on the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 as well as a Game Gear Micro miniconsole. Unfortunately, this compilation has yet to make it out of Japan.

As Our Series Continues…

We’re moving on to the 1990s console and arcade games to cover one of the golden eras of video gaming as gaming shifted to 16 bits at home and true 3D in the arcades!

We’ll cover shoot ‘em ups, run and guns, fighters, brawlers, RPGs, platformers and, of course, strategy games, sports games and more. Take some time learn about great games you may have missed like M.U.S.H.A., Ranger X, Thunder Force III, Liquid Kids, Alligator Hunt, Arabian Fight, Gaiapolis, Popful Mail, Keio Flying Squadron, Boogie Wings, Kid Dracula, Little Samson, The Space Adventure, Rocket Knight Adventures, Rolo to the Rescue and even oddities like The Haunting Starring Polterguy and The Ooze!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC, console and arcade games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 3. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.

Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!

Computer Games - 1980s

• Planetfall and Stationfall (1983 and 1987) (Full entry here) – One of the funniest – and most heartbreaking! – interactive adventure series ever created. A must-play for fans of the Space Quest games or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Don’t let the lack of graphics keep you away from these wonderful games but do consider downloading a map and some hints if you’re not in the habit of taking notes while you play.

• Alley Cat (1983) (Full entry here) – An excellent arcade-style game about cats with an awesome (and free!) Windows remake that supports up to 4 local players.

• Time Bandit (1983) (Full entry here) – An incredibly fun combination of Pac-Man, Gauntlet and Time Pilot. The 1985 remake on the Atari ST is the one to play.

• Below the Root (1984) (Full entry here) – A platformer-style adventure game with a huge, interesting game world and an epic story based on a series of novels by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Notable for being non-violent and non-linear. The 1985 follow-up game Alice in Wonderland is also great; I prefer the Commodore 64 version for both

• Park Patrol (1984) (Full entry here) – Who would have guessed one of Activision’s best arcade action games of the early 1980s is a PC exclusive based on collecting trash in a public park? Try the Commodore 64 version.

• Space Taxi (1984) (Summary here) – Combine Crazy Taxi with Lunar Lander and you’ll get something akin to this excellent Commodore 64 platform puzzler. The 2005 Windows-based shareware sequel is also great.

• Spy vs. Spy Trilogy (1984, 1985 and 1988) (Full entry here) – A clever concept for a local splitscreen multiplayer game where seeing the other character’s screen is a core mechanic. Best on the Amiga or Atari ST.

• SunDog: Frozen Legacy (1984) (Full entry here) – An absolutely massive space trading and strategy game that still holds up well today. Using your starship, the SunDog, you try to help a religious colony get the supplies and followers it needs while you build up a reputation for yourself as a space merchant. Highly recommended for fans of the 2012 game FTL: Faster Than Light, as it has a similar look and feel. Best on the Atari ST.

• Alcazar: The Forgotten Fortress (1985) (Full entry here) – An adventure RPG that’s highly reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda, but which actually came out the year before it. It was a Coleco Adam exclusive that was later ported to other platforms. Today, it’s best on the Commodore 64.

• Mail-Order Monsters (1985) (Full entry here) – Create your own monsters and go on a rampage, battling other beasts and destroying cities as you grow more powerful. Best on the Commodore 64.

• Paradroid (1985) (Full entry here) – An exceptionally smart game about using an inconspicuous robot to reprogram other, more dangerous robots who’ve taken over a starship. The Heavy Metal Paradroid version on the Commodore 64 is great, but there are also many modern remakes.

• Lode Runner’s Rescue (1985) (Full entry here) – A cool isometric action puzzler that bears little resemblance to its classic namesake, but which is still a great game. It’s best on the Commodore 64.

• Airheart (1986) (Full entry here) – One of the few can’t miss arcade action games exclusive to the Apple II. It’s a breathtaking pseudo-3D action game that’s still a lot of fun today. It was later ported to the Amiga and Atari ST as Typhoon Thompson in Search of the Sea Child, but it’s pretty much the same game experience.

• Alter Ego (1986) (Full entry here) – A life simulation role-playing adventure game where you play through the entire life of a single character from birth to death. It’s a bit dated in places and thus best to just pretend it’s a simulator about what life was like growing up in the early 1980s. Perfectly playable in any version, but there are modern mobile and web-based ports available.

• The Sentinel (a.k.a. The Sentry) (1986) (Full entry here) – A unique and surreal 3D action puzzler that’s difficult to explain, but which is a blast to play once you understand its mechanics. Move your Synthoid robot up a hill boulder by boulder and try not to get spotted by the Sentinel. Good on any platform, but probably best on the Amiga or Atari ST.

• Starflight (1986) (Summary here) – The spiritual grandfather of Star Control II, Mass Effect, No Man’s Sky, Starfield and many other space-themed exploration RPGs. While it was incredibly popular in its day, most modern gamers have no idea it ever existed, and that needs to change. All PC versions are good, but the Sega Genesis remake is more like the classic Star Control II and is recommended for modern players. The sequel (which is PC only) is also excellent and plays well on all platforms.

• They $tole a Million (1986) (Full entry here) – A one-of-a-kind strategy game where you plan out heists and then set your crack team of criminal specialists loose as you direct the action from outside the building. Best on the Commodore 64.

• Uridium (1986) (Full entry here) – An amazingly fluid shoot ‘em up where the player can shift direction left or right and take down a massive spaceship on each level. Best on the Commodore 64. Ported to the NES in North America as The Last Starfighter.

• The Faery Tale Adventure: Book I (1987) (Full entry here) – An excellent action RPG that uses an overhead perspective to allow you to roam around a giant world (think Ultima VII). While the story’s ho-hum and combat becomes trivially easy within a few hours of starting, the game will appeal to those who enjoy open-world exploration. Best on the Amiga, but also available on the Sega Genesis.

• The Fool’s Errand (1987) (Full entry here) – A clever and imaginative puzzle game based around the tarot deck that seems simple at first, but which has multiple layers of mysteries to ponder as you delve further into it. A classic on the Macintosh - and the creator has released an official free version to play on modern hardware through a Mac emulator.

• Nebulus (1987) (Full entry here) – While it’s also known today by many other names including Tower Toppler, Castelian, Kyorochan Land and Subline, it doesn’t matter; every version is about a reptile-like critter ascending a cylindrical tower and dodging enemies who want to knock him down to the lower levels. It’s one of the best-looking games on the Commodore 64, but great in any of its many versions, which include PCs, consoles and handhelds.

• Oids (1987) (Full entry here) – Mash together Choplifter and Gravitar and you get an amazing fun and accessible rescue game that holds up well today. It was one of the few games that set the Atari ST apart in the 1980s (until it received a 1990 Macintosh port and 2002 sequel), and it even includes a level editor.

• Wizball (1987) (Full entry here) – A truly unique side-scrolling shooter from Sensible Software in which you play as a wizard and his cat as they transform into green balls and fly around surreal landscapes. The Commodore 64 version is the classic (and has an unofficial freeware Windows remake from 2007), but the Amiga and Atari ST versions are also worth a look.

• Exile (1988) (Full entry here) – An amazing open-world action adventure that any fan of Metroid or Axiom Verge will love. While the controls take some getting used to, they’re absolutely worth the trouble. Try the 1991 Amiga or Atari ST remake.

• TRAZ: Transformable Arcade Zone (1988) (Full entry here) – A Breakout-style constructor set that includes 64 inventive levels as well as the ability to create your own wild ideas for a brick breaker. The Commodore 64 version is excellent.

• Trinity (1988) (Full entry here) – Brian Moriarty’s poetic text-based adventure about the horrific effects of nuclear war. It’s a brilliant game that will leave you thinking long after you’re finished. I’m not sure graphics could ever do this game justice. Good on just about any platform.

• Eye of Horus (1989) (Full entry here) – An Egyptian-themed action platformer similar to Metroid that fans of exploration adventures will adore. The controls are a bit clunky, but once you master them, the gameplay is golden. The Amiga and Atari ST versions are gorgeous.

• First Strike (1989) (Featured in the upcoming book!) – An After Burner-style game that features some of the best and smoothest graphics the Commodore 64 can offer. It features eight missions and plenty of great action as you fly an F-16 and take out land, air and sea targets on a 3D playing field.

• Midwinter (1989) (Full entry here) – Imagine what it’d be like to play a game like Just Cause 4 or Far Cry 6 in the late 1980s; throw in a little bit of Ghost Recon and SSX to that and you’ll get Midwinter, an open world first person action strategy game where you ski down hills, drive snow buggies, fire missiles from hang gliders, blow up buildings and recruit allies for guerilla-style ambushes. It has one heck of a learning curve due to its choppy framerate and unique controls, but it’s worth the trouble. It was an Atari ST standard, but I recommend the DOS version for modern players.

• Renegade III: The Final Chapter (1989) (Full entry here) – A completely bonkers PC-only threequel to the arcade classic. Instead of fighting in a gritty urban setting, you travel through time and fight in the age of the dinosaurs, ancient Egypt, the Middle Ages and an alien future. Best on the Commodore 64 (where it has a suitably strange ending), but beloved on the ZX Spectrum as well.

• Prophecy: Fall of Trinadon (1989) (Full entry here) – An excellent action RPG that’s fun, accessible and which features an engaging story and a unique magic system. Great for fans of series like Ys or The Secret of Mana. I’m amazed this game isn’t better-known today. Only available on DOS.

• Stunt Track Racer (a.k.a. Stunt Car Racer) (1989) (Full entry here) – An amazing 3D game for its time about racing on a high-up track loaded with jumps and tricky turns. There’s never been another game quite like it. Play it on the Amiga or Atari ST; avoid the DOS version.

• Sword of the Samurai (1989) (Full entry here) – The follow-up to Sid Meier’s Pirates!, set in Sengoku-era Japan and featuring a deep simulation of the life of an up-and-coming samurai. A bit of an acquired taste, but tremendously fun. It’s only available on DOS, but easy to buy and play through GOG.com.

Console and Arcade Games - 1980s

• Warlords (1980, Arcade or Atari 2600) (Full entry will be in the book!) One of the earliest and greatest 4-player multiplayer experiences gaming has ever had to offer, sort of like a chaotic session of Breakout where you have to defend a corner of the screen. Best played on the original arcade cocktail table setup or the Atari 2600 hardware.

• Mine Storm (1982, Vectrex) (Full entry here) A built-in game for the Vectrex console that’s definitely inspired by Atari’s Asteroids, but which is superior in just about every way. The vector-based graphics still look great today and the gameplay is amazingly, addictively smooth. Its 1983 sequel is the best version to play if you’re hoping to go the distance – it’s actually a debugged version of the original that was sent out to gamers who complained that the 1982 game crashed on Level 13.

• Pepper II (1982, Arcade and ColecoVision) (Full entry here) Imagine that you took several Pac-Man mazes and mashed them up with Qix and then added in an angel with a fascination with zippers and an aversion to floating eyes. Give that angel an ability to turn into a devil whenever he captures a pitchfork and you’ve got Pepper II, a brilliant arcade game from Exidy that’s even better in its ColecoVision port.

• Shark! Shark! (1982, Intellivision) (Full entry here) A wonderful game about a big fish eating his way to near the top of the food chain while avoiding a hungry shark. The two-player mode is particularly fun since you not only compete to eat but can also devour each other.

• Super Locomotive (1982, Arcade) (Full entry here) An amazingly fun early Sega arcade game that gives a whole new meaning to the term “rail shooter” – you literally drive a train that shoots puffs of smoke at enemies! What makes it special is the fact that half the screen is reserved for an overhead view so you can easily switch tracks, which is super handy when you have trains with big beefy arms pursuing you.

• Happy Trails (1983, Intellivision) (Full entry here) A clever and unique puzzle strategy game where you rearrange tiles in a maze to help your sheriff retrieve money stolen by the evil Black Bart. It even has a two-player mode where you compete for points.

• Intrepid (1983, Arcade) (Full entry here) Take Elevator Action, combine it with some stealthy heist mechanics and you’ll get this wonderful Canadian arcade game that has you trying to break into an embassy vault before the guards catch up with you.

• Pitfall II: Lost Caverns (1983, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, Arcade, SG-1000) (Full entry here) You know a game’s good when it comes in four different variants and all of them are worth recommending. The Atari 2600 original is a landmark open-world exploration game about finding a gem, a girl and a cowardly cat. The Atari 5200 and PC version include a second map as an Easter egg. The Sega-produced arcade game and home console version each offer unique takes on the gameplay and even include homages to the original Pitfall!.

• Time Gal (1983, Arcade) (Full entry will be in the book!) A Japanese anime laserdisc game featuring a time travel storyline and exciting animation. Travel from the age of dinosaurs all the way into the far future, often encountering the meanest people every time period has to offer along the way. Just wait until you visit the far-off dystopia of AD 2001 (where hover-bike games roam the highways) and the cosmic future of 2010 (where humanity’s lunar base is under attack by asteroids). Avoid the scaled-down Sega CD edition; find an import of the Japanese arcade original.

• Acrobatic Dog-Fight (1984, Arcade) (Full entry here) Have you ever wanted to hijack a plane in mid-air, shoot down some flying pigs and then parachute down to the ground, only to get roasted by Godzilla? You can do all of that and more in this peculiar little gem of an arcade game with some unique gameplay mechanics and a whole lot of charm.

• H.E.R.O. (1984, Atari 2600) (Full entry here) John Van Ryzin’s rescue game is a goofy creation where you wear a homemade helicopter backpack and shoot cave dwelling creatures with your head-mounted laser, but it’s an excellent action puzzler with fast, fluid graphics and responsive controls. The Atari 2600 original is nearly perfect to the point that later ports (such as the excellent ColecoVision edition) could only really improve the graphics.

• Mad Crasher (1984, Arcade) (Full entry here) Combine Tron with Spy Hunter and you’ve got this cool isometric action racer from SNK which looks great and plays like an electronic dream, complete with allusions to other early SNK games like Marvin’s Maze and Vanguard II. I have no idea why it’s so obscure today, and though it had a worldwide release, it never got a home version.

• Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure (1984, Arcade) (Full entry here) Leave it to Technōs to take a very weird and obscure overhead action game called Scrambled Egg, infuse some Indiana Jones-inspired theming and go on to create one of the most original (and best-looking) arcade games of the early 80s. As you raid ancient tombs as Dr. John, you’ll kick over many mysterious stones on your path to fame, fortune and the secrets of the universe.

• Spatter (1984, Arcade) (Full entry here) A maze game about a young boy riding a tricycle and collecting flowers in a kingdom in the clouds is called… Spatter? Let’s hope Sega fired whoever named this game, but let’s also hope more people become aware it exists, because it’s fantastic and offers 100 levels of evading enemies by bending your trike around fences and moving obstacles around to deter your pursuers. Just watch out for the steamroller!

• Penguin-kun Wars (1985, Arcade) (Full entry here) You’re a penguin facing another animal across a table. Your job is to throw as many balls as you can onto the other side before the timer runs out. It’s a simple concept, but it makes for an exciting and highly playable competitive game, and the cute graphics make it fun for gamers of all ages.

• Peter Pack Rat (1985, Arcade) (Full entry here) A charming stealth action game where you retrieve items from around three different levels and battle mean-spirited animals who don’t want you to have nice things. The graphics and music are true stand-outs, particularly for a game from the mid-80s.

• Speed Buggy (a.k.a. Buggy Boy) (1985, Arcade) (Full entry here)- You have to see this racer to believe it; it looks like a cel-shaded 3D game with smooth animation, and it plays like a dream, especially when it has the three screens it was designed for. Surprisingly, the Commodore 64 port is considered one of the greatest games on that platform, and the Amiga and Atari ST ports are very close to the arcade experience.

• Athena (1986, Arcade) (Full entry here) SNK’s action RPG platformer starring the charismatic Princess Athena (not to be confused with her Psycho Soldier descendant from The King of Fighters!). While the game is tough, it features some neat moments, transformations and boss battles. The NES adaptation is quite different and not as special as the arcade game.

• Legend (1986, Arcade) (Full entry here) A unique action platformer where you hire soldiers to march in front of you and do your fighting for you. While it’s a little rough around the edges, the unusual mechanics and non-linear paths make this one a true hidden gem.

• Momoko 120% (1986, Arcade) (Full entry here) You begin as a 4-year-old girl escaping her school as aliens invade the floors and flames rise from the bottom. And then, you do it again and again and again until you get married, have a daughter and watch her repeat the cycle. It’s a weird and wonderful concept for a game that also begs the question of who, exactly, is setting all these fires?

• Super Stingray (1986, Arcade) (Full entry here) Here’s a unique concept for a shoot ‘em up – your base is at the bottom of a long vertical screen, and your enemy’s base is at the top. Your job is to eliminate enemy tanks and punch through the enemy’s base as quickly as possible using the power-ups your own base provides. But you also have to make sure the enemies don’t destroy your base in the meantime.

• UFO Robo Dangar (1986, Arcade) (Full entry here) A fun Xevious-style overhead shoot ‘em up where you start out as a giant robot who can split into three ships or eventually morph into a humongous flying saucer. Fans of mecha anime will find this shooter delightful.

• Cratermaze (1987, Arcade, Famicom, TurboGrafx-16) (Full entry here) Take Bomberman and Lode Runner, then blend them up into a smoother, more laid-back overhead trap maze game about time travel. The arcade original goes by Kid no Hore Hore Daisakusen, the PC Engine version stars Doraemon and the distinctive Famicom adaptation is - *sigh* - called Booby Kids. But however you play it, Cratermaze is a great game.

• Psycho Soldier (1987, Arcade) (Full entry here) Idol singer and psychic warrior Athena Asamiya has appeared in many SNK games, and her theme song (which includes digital vocals in both Japanese and English written specifically for this game!) adds some distinctive charm to this great multi-lane scrolling shooter. While it’s not an easy game, it’s a fun one, particularly with two players.

• Rainbow Islands: The Story of Bubble Bobble 2 (1987, Arcade, PC, NES) (Full entry here) Taito’s seemingly simple follow-up to the classic Bubble Bobble holds surprising depth, both in terms of the discussion about the game itself and all of the craziness that surrounds it. Suffice it to say that this game deserves far more attention than it’s received in North America. You should definitely play it.

• Tower of Doom (1987, Intellivision) (Full entry here) A roguelike dungeon crawler that was originally supposed to be the third Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game for the Intellivision but which was changed to an original IP after being shelved for years and then dusted off for the platform’s last hurrah. It’s not much to look at, but there’s quite a game under that primitive presentation, much like the ASCII art PC games that inspired it.

• Wonder Momo (1987, Arcade) (Full entry here) A distinctive beat ‘em up where you play as an idol singer putting on an Ultraman-style stage show for her adoring fans. It’s a Japanese game through and through, but it features a wonderful heroine, a catchy soundtrack and an awful lot of charisma.

• Forgotten Worlds (1988, Arcade) (Full entry will be in the book!) Capcom’s fusion of run and gun and shoot ‘em up mechanics feels like someone smashed Contra into R-Type and Space Harrier, and the result is an unusual but tremendously fun game with awesome action, gorgeous graphics and huge boss fights. The story’s also awesomely ridiculous. It’s a fun ride only marred by a unique control scheme that doesn’t translate perfectly to modern controllers.

• The Guardian Legend (1988, NES) (Full entry will be in the book!) A genre-bending mash-up of shoot ‘em ups like Zanac and adventure RPGs like The Legend of Zelda with a great story and a lot of fun shooting thanks to a large assortment of weapons. That it looks great for a NES game and has an awesome soundtrack doesn’t hurt, either. Don’t miss this one; it’s a cult classic for a reason.

• Märchen Maze (1988, Arcade) (Full entry here) Alice’s adventures in Wonderland are a little different than you might remember as you play through this isometric shooter and platformer with crazy enemies and wonderfully weird bosses. It’s easily one of the best-looking games of the era thanks to some gorgeous designs and a perspective that adds visual depth to the game’s dreamlike world. I prefer the arcade original to the PC Engine port.

• The New Zealand Story (1988, Arcade, PC, NES, Genesis, TurboGrafx-16) (Full entry here) Ignore the stupid jokes about the title – this game is the real deal as far as maze platformers go, and if you still haven’t experienced it, you absolutely need to. It’s one of the finest 1980s games I’ve ever played, and just about every home version accurately translates the arcade original well.

• Ninja Spirit (1988, Arcade, TurboGrafx-16) (Full entry here) Forget about Shinobi and Ninja Gaiden – this is the greatest ninja action game to ever hit 1980s arcades. With four weapons and the assistance of magical shadows, work your way through seven stages and defeat some epic bosses. I recommend the TurboGrafx-16 version because it’s a tad easier than the unforgiving arcade original.

• Raimais (1988, Arcade) (Full entry here) Taito tried to do for maze chase games with Raimais (“Ray Maze”) what their earlier Arkanoid did for brick breakers, and while it obviously didn’t have the same impact, it’s still an awesome and accessible game where you drive a futuristic car and collect dots while you dodge enemies. Be sure to play the Japanese original to enjoy the anime-inspired, fully-voiced cutscenes and dramatic endings – they were cut from the international version.

• SpellCaster (1988, Sega Master System) (Full entry here)- Is it a sidescrolling action game, an RPG, an adventure game, an overhead shoot ‘em up or an anime adaptation that’s been lightly localized? The answer to all five questions is “yes,” and if you’ve ever wondered if you missed any truly great games on the Sega Master System and haven’t played SpellCaster, the answer there is “yes” as well. Things are a bit stiff and clunky at first, but once you get going, you’ll find a spirit-filled adventure unlike any other. The sort-of-sequel Mystic Defender is also worth checking out on the Sega Genesis, though it’s an arcade action game through and through.

• Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother (1988, Arcade) (Full entry here) Yes, that really is the title of this incredible helicopter-based overhead shoot ‘em up where you decimate everything in sight and can even blow up the trees. It’s amazingly silly and over-the-top, complete with horse whinnies when you pick up power-ups and a vocal soundtrack that can be easily misheard as an anthem to bombing villages. It’s also well-made and a ton of fun in its arcade incarnation; avoid the inferior NES port.

• Xexyz (1988, NES) (Full entry here) A game that has a little bit of everything, including action platforming sequences, shoot ‘em up stages, light action RPG and adventure mechanics and a mishmash of fantasy and science fiction foes along with giant ocean-inspired bosses. There are even hot tubbing nude fairies to rescue. I’m not sure how Hudson Soft and Atlus got past Nintendo’s censors or why they gave the North American version of this game such a ridiculously unpronounceable title, but Xexyz is definitely worth your time to play.

• Cadash (1989, Arcade) (Full entry here) The original arcade version of Taito’s Cadash is an amazingly fun sidescrolling action RPG where you can pick one of four different characters and play through an adventure that includes all sorts of monsters to slay, bosses to battle and females to rescue. Even better, it can be played co-op. Just don’t waste your time with the far more limited home versions.

• Final Lap Twin (1989, TurboGrafx-16) (Full entry here) Now this is how you port an arcade game to a console! Namco’s splitscreen F-3000 and F-1 GP racer is fun on its own and plays like a souped up Pole Position, but its Pokémon-style Quest Mode where you travel the world and take challenges from other racers is so crazy it actually works.

• Herzog Zwei (1989, Sega Genesis) (Full entry here) Technōsoft didn’t create the real-time strategy game, but it did establish the template that inspired the mid-1990s craze thanks to Westwood Associates and Blizzard copying its formula. If you enjoy RTS games like Total Annihilation, you’re going to love this game, which has you fly a powerful transforming Robotech-style mech and deploy troops around a map filled with bases you either need to conquer or destroy. It even has a two-player competitive mode.

• Last Alert (1989, TurboGrafxCD) (Full entry here) Imagine you inserted a blatant copycat of Rambo in an anime-style story filled with Metal Gear Solid-like villains sourced from other popular action movies. Then you made an exciting and fun overhead shooter to go with it, complete with fully voiced cutscenes and a rocking soundtrack. Now suppose you hired a cut-rate studio to handle the English language localization and dubbing, with hilarious results, to include in a CD-ROM game on a console add-on barely anyone outside of Japan bought. All of this actually happened, and the result is one of the cheesiest run and gun games I’ve ever played; a shooter which is so silly, it almost seems like a parody of itself. I love every minute of it, and I bet you will too.

• The Legend of Valkyrie (1989, Arcade) (Full entry here) A beautiful and fun action arcade RPG that’s sort of like The Legend of Zelda if it were a co-operative overhead shooter. It features branching levels, big bosses and deep mechanics as well as a lot of charm. I recommend the PlayStation version from Namco Museum Vol. 5 since it’s the only edition to date that’s been translated to English.

• Little Ninja Brothers (1989, NES) (Full entry here) A humorous and distinctive Japanese RPG from Culture Brain’s Super Chinese series that’s not only entirely 2-player from start to finish, but also includes a strong mix of action and questing as well as a competitive mode. It’s one of the best-kept secrets of the NES library.

• Mendel Palace (a.k.a. Qunity) (Full entry here) A highly unique NES and Famicom puzzler by Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokémon. While the concept of shuffling square tiles to knock enemies against walls is completely bizarre, the gameplay is intuitive and the graphics are impressively smooth, featuring great shuffling effects and oddball enemies.

• Military Madness (a.k.a. Nectaris) (1989, TurboGrafx-16) (Full entry here) Are you a fan of strategy wargames like Advance Wars or Panzer General? If so, you owe it to yourself to try this excellent turn-based strategy game that never had a chance as a niche console game on an obscure platform, but which is definitely worth your while. It even has an excellent in-game manual to guide you through it!

• S.T.U.N. Runner (1989, Arcade) (Full entry here) An absolutely amazing (you thought I was going to say stunning, right?) Atari Games arcade combat racer featuring full 3D graphics in an era where most racing games were still scaling their sprites. It’s like playing WipEout six years before that game even existed, and its futuristic visual design and surreal graphics still hold up well today thanks to fluid motion and great gameplay. The Atari Lynx version must be seen to be believed; it’s the only home port worth playing, and it replicates the game faithfully on a handheld somehow.

When will more games be added?
As I get through each era, I conclude with my must-play list. My next addition will probably be sometime in 2027. In the meantime, check out my list of my favorite games if you want to head into other eras!