lunatic obscurity

Gunnm (under its English title Battle Angel Alita) is one of my all-time favourite manga, so it's a mystery why it's taken me so long to get around to playing this adaptation of it, when the fantranslation has been out a few years already at this point.

When this game recently got a translation patch, and having playe the SNES Spriggan game, which is a high-quality, but conceptually pretty standards shooting game, I assumed this was one of those cases where a team practices by translating and patching a…

Also known as Tenryu Genichiro no Puroresu Revolution (which was also a tie-in with the excellently named 90s promotion WAR: Wrestle And Romance), Hammerlock Wrestling is a game I vaguely remember trying out back in the ancient days of DreamSNES.

The original Robo Pit was a game that I rented multiple times back during the Playstation's heyday.

Though like any normal person, I prefer my shooting games to strictly follow arcade-style rules: no meta-progression, continues optional (and preferably punished), and scoring being based as much on skill (and as little on either luck or grinding) as poss…

Gegege no Kitaro is one of those series I think everyone's aware of through its influence, but it's not widely seen or read by English-speaking audiences.

So this game is based on an anime that I've never seen (and which seems to be officially known in English as Elemental Gelade, and I did have to look up both spellings to get the exact right arrangement of Ls, Rs, and vowels), but it's a fighting game by…

If you've heard of this game, it's probably due to its presence on various "worst Dreamcast games ever" lists.

I feel like whenever I look into the library of the Famicom Disk System, I find a lot of games that are kind of interesting as curiosities, as well as the seedy underbelly of the 1980s Famicom boom.

1990's Pipe Dream was a favourite of mine among the games inclided in the thirty-two game Game Boy multicart I had as a kid and I know there's probably been a ton of updates and sequels and so on, with or without the approval of the original developers, b…

Judging by the title, I really expected Tiny Bullets to be another one of those excellent 3D shooting games secretly hiding in the Playstation library, like Gungage and Cosmowarrior Zero.

A quick disclaimer first: after I'd already bought a physical copy of this game, and then played it for a week and a half, I found out that it actually has a western release (though I don't think it has a physical version), under the title Cats Away.

This is a demake of World of Horror, a game I haven't yet played (though I'm sure I will eventually), but which drew me in simply for the novelty of being a horror game made for Game Boy Color.

While looking up which came first out of the Battle Athletess anime and videogames, I found something surprising: it was neither!

As a publisher, Midas were famous mainly for two things: localising occasionally interesting Japanese budget games, and also publishing mostly-terrible original budget games.

This is a game I've been meaning to write about for a long time, and finally, I'm getting around to it (the roadblock being that I misplaced my original DS and have now finally got ahold of a gizmo that can satisfactorily emulate the DS and take screensho…

In real life, coin pushers are a hated scourge, the disease that has overrun and essentially killed off everything fun and interesting in the UK's seaside arcades.

Under normal circumstances, I'm a defender of short games.

Among the many prominent and exciting translation patches that have been released in recent times, it feels like Wonder Trek kind of fell by the wayside, and didn't really get the attention it deserved.

Space Harrier is obviously an excellent game, but since the hard of thinking like to assume that there's no place for sprite scaling in a world with polygons, and that there's no place for rail shooters when free roaming flight sim-style shooters exist, t…

It never really became a mainstream hit like Streets of Rage or Final Fight, but for a short time after its original arcade release and subsequent Super Famicom port, Undercover Cops had at least built up a sizable cult following in Japan.

Though I think nowadays, when people think of Hokuto no Ken games on 8- and 16-bit consoles, they're more likely to think of the ones on Master System and Mega Drive, there was a series of them on Nintendo's consoles, too.

Something interesting about budget hames in particular is the way in whih the best of them manage to get a maximum amount of game with a minimum amount of resources, especially when they manage to do it without resorting to boring grinding or other timesi…

Steel Dragon EX is a compilation of two games: Steel Dragon, which is a port of the 1997 arcade game Shienryu, and an all-new game, Steel Dragon Evolution, which was called Shienryu Explosion on the Japanese version of the disc (Simple 2000 Series Vol. 37:

Circa 1991-1993, alongside the earliest burgeonings of my interest in Sonic, there was another intense interest, though one that would turn out to be significantly shortler lived: Tiny Toon Adventures.

Everyone loves to read about Japan-exclusive Playstation games, but Blood Lines is part of a much rarer breed: PAL-exclusive Playstation games!

It might seem a little odd for me to be writing about a game that's a tie-in to an incredibly popular mainstream movie.

The Monster Rancher series is one with which I'm not very familiar.