SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy
SNK’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed over the years, having gone bankrupt in 2001 then resurrected by Playmore, then floundering …
Animal Land Satsujin Jiken
Enix kickstarted the whole mystery Japanese adventure game craze of the 80s with Portopia Satsujin Renzoku Jiken, which was followed …
Legend of Hero Tonma
Legend of Hero Tonma is one of those ridiculously difficult arcade side-scrollers from Irem, continuing their traditional of previous games …
Cease and Desist – Parodies and Infringement in Video Games
Much of the video game industry was the Wild West during the 80s, particularly in Japan. Since it wasn’t regulated …
Monster Pro Wrestling
As wrestling video games grew in popularity in the early 90s (largely thanks to the Fire Pro Wrestling series, at …
Paladin (Dark Age of JRPGs)
Paladin (or “The Paladin“, as written in-game) is an early action-RPG released by Bothtec in 1985. Various Japanese sites indicate …
Wild Riders
Sega/Wow Entertainments’s Wild Riders is part of the company’s long line of intense arcade racing games, but it’s got a …
Cool Riders
Cool Riders looks and feels a lot like OutRunners, one of the sequels to OutRun, except it features motorcycles rather …
HG101 at the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo and A Video Game Con
The Long Island Retro Gaming Expo is this weekend, on Saturday and Sunday, August 11th and 12th. Myself and Xerxes …
Ninja Emaki
Capcom’s 1985 release Commando basically defined the overhead run-and-gun arcade genre, with many other similar games (particularly Ikari Warriors) also re-using …
Cross-Series Cameo: Adol in Lunar: The Silver Star
Video game publishers occasionally cross-reference competitors titles in cheeky ways, though sometimes have to be done subtly to avoid copyright …
Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection
Zwei II (also known as Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection for its English release) was released seven years after the original, …
Riglas (Dark Age of JRPGs)
Most RPGs of the 80s utilized an overhead view or a first person perspective, while a select few (such as …
Japanese Video Game Obscurities Update: Games That Didn’t Make The Cut
In the last update, I posted the finalized list of games featured in this book. If you’re wondering what happened …
