The Journeyman Project was developed by Presto Studios and released for Mac in 1993. The following year an enhanced version was released called The Journeyman Project: Turbo which was compatible with Mac and Windows. This Turbo release is the one being highlighted today. The original release was developed and published by Presto Studios, with the Turbo release being published by Sanctuary Woods. This version would also see a Japanese release published by Bandai. A few years later in 1997 a full blown remake of the game was released called The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime.
While I certainly remember the hype behind The Blair Witch Project and the marketing campaign that led many to believe the film was found footage of real events, I never watched the movie back in the day and truthfully have still never seen it. However, as a huge fan of the survival-horror genre, I couldn't help but feel intrigued when the trailer for a new Blair Witch game was first shown last summer. Thanks to the game being easily available to play, I didn't wait long after its release to give it a try, and I was pleasantly surprised overall.
When it was brought to my attention that September 2019 marked the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Sega Dreamcast in North America, I felt compelled to actually play something on Sega's short-lived final console, which is something I rarely do. Since the Dreamcast has a handful of exclusive survival-horror titles that have never been ported or re-released on other consoles, it only seemed fitting that I would check out one of these titles and see how it holds up. Being a huge fan of the Resident Evil series, I decided to go with an unabashed Resident Evil knockoff known as Carrier.
Carrier is a Sega Dreamcast exclusive survival-horror title that was developed and published by Jaleco. Released in North America, Japan, and Europe on January 31, 2000, February 24, 2000, and July 5, 2001 respectively, it was met with mostly mixed criticism. A sequel was planned to be released for the PlayStation 2 but was ultimately canceled. Carrier has since faded into relative obscurity as it was likely overshadowed by the much more popular Resident Evil CODE: Veronica which released only a month later in North America.
In 1996 a legendary game designer left Capcom to form his own game development company. Tokuro Fujiwara founded Whoopee Camp after an insane career as a video game director and producer that spanned over a decade at Capcom. Fujiwara's credits listings while working at Capcom easily rank him amongst the greatest game designers of the 8 and 16 bit arcade and console era. He is credited with creating Ghosts 'n Goblins, directing and producing multiple games including Sweet Home, Breath of Fire, DuckTales and many other Capcom licensed games from the era, Final Fight 2 and Final Fight 3, and multiple Mega Man games. What would be Fujiwara and Whoopee Camp's first game after Fujiwara left this legacy behind and forged his own path?
The Nintendo DS was a landmark handheld console. In hindsight Nintendo looks prophetic with its adoption of a touchscreen in the years just before the idea of the smartphone takes hold in the public consciousness. This touchscreen allowed many gameplay ideas that were once slow and clunky to become much smoother. Point and click adventure games are mostly known from the PC market, but there have been some ports and original point and clicks on older consoles and handhelds. The DS with its touchscreen allowed point and click adventure games to be played in the palm of everybody's hand, and there was an explosion of them. One of the early prominent developers of DS point and click adventures was the Japanese developer Cing. In 2005 they released Another Code: Two Memories, which was renamed Trace Memory for North America. In 2007 the company released Hotel Dusk: Room 215, both of these titles did quite well for the small developer. However, Cing was not able to keep this momentum rolling and went defunct in 2010.
Hotel Dusk was the first of a two part series, with its sequel being Last Window: The Secret of Cape West. Both games released on the DS, and Last Window was also Cing's final game before going bankrupt. Nintendo published all these DS titles, but part of Cing's problems may have been the seemingly random release regions of their games. Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk released in Japan, North America, and Europe and achieved some success. Last Window and Trace Memory's sequel, Another Code: R - A Journey into Lost Memories for the Wii, only released in Japan and Europe. Last Window released too late in Cing's life to likely come to North America, they were already dying when the game was releasing. What was strange about Hotel Dusk was that its first release region was in North America. So what made Hotel Dusk so special that many adventure game fans had to have it and play it? What gave it the crossover appeal to give it that little extra push?
In 1995 LucasArts released an adventure game that was a little different from anything they had developed before. It deals with motorcycles, mechanics and murder. It's Full Throttle! I teamed up with the Adventure Game Geek to give you two opinions for the price of one. We played the recent remastered version of the game, though do compare it to the original.
Praise the Sun! With the announcement of Dark Souls Remastered on the latest Nintendo Direct, I felt it might be time to give a full look at a cult classic, and to explain why it makes it pretty high on my "all-time" list. I know I already did a look at what I don't like (link http://www.rfgeneration.c...About-Dark-Souls-3506.php) but I thought it warranted a focused look at the good parts, especially with a re-release on the horizon.
Late last year, once all of the annual 'Best of' lists started coming out for the games released in 2016, I lamented the fact that I had only played a paltry four new release titles from the year and thus had no opinion on many of the games that were being discussed. So in 2017, I was determined to play more new release titles during the year in an effort to stay more up-to-date with all of the discussions going on for the latest and greatest games. And just like with everything I do, I went insanely overboard and ended up playing nearly 30 new release titles this year.
Instead of doing a traditional Top 10 list of the games I played this year, I wanted to focus on a select few that I thought were particularly great but may unfortunately go unnoticed and slip under the radar of most people. Most of these games really aren't what you would call obscure, but with the massive amount of great games released this year, it can be easy to forget about the ones that didn't get quite as much coverage. These also aren't necessarily my favorite games of the year, as I am intentionally leaving out some of the more popular titles that were released.
Today I'm reviewing one of the best point and click adventure games ever - The Secret of Monkey Island. It combines great music and visuals with laugh out loud humour. It also represents a departure from adventure games of its time by being much less punishing towards its players. I'll be mainly talking about the original but I'll also touch on the Special Edition released in 2009 and how it compares.
I have been hearing for years that The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky is one of the finest JRPGs to be released in recent years. As a huge RPG fan, this high praise obviously piqued my interest, and despite never giving the Sony PSP the attention it deserved, it put Trails in the Sky on my radar as a game I should play. With the recent release of Trails in the Sky the 3rd in North America bringing the series to my attention once again, I have finally played the initial entry of this prestigious series!
Quest for Glory is a hybrid adventure-RPG series from Sierra. In the first entry in the series, you find yourself in the Valley of Spielburg. The land has been cursed by an Ogress, the Baron's children are missing, and a band of Brigands terrorize the town. Can you solve all of these problems and become a hero?
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is a point and click adventure horror game. It skips the typical jump scares and gore and goes straight for an unsettling look at human suffering...and machines that rise up to kill us all! It's based on the story by Harlan Ellison and he even voices the misanthropic computer, AM, who is responsible for humanity's downfall and the suffering of the game's protagonists. This is a grim game, but one with excellent writing and characterization.
Since buying a Retron 5 nearly two years ago, I have invested a great deal of time and money into acquiring many of the great Super Famicom exclusive titles that we were not fortunate enough to receive in North America. Thanks to the Retron's ability to apply translation patches to the games (assuming that someone has gone through the trouble of translating the text and creating the patch for said game), not being able to understand text-heavy games because they are in Japanese is no longer an issue for those of us who don't speak the language.
Unfortunately, despite my ambitions of playing through all of these newly added imports in my collection, I have only played through a couple of these titles so far. However, I plan on putting forth a more solid effort toward playing more of these games in the future, starting with what will hopefully be the first of many Japan exclusive titles that I will be reviewing for this site: Alcahest!
As a kid growing up in the early to mid-90s, videogames were a huge part of my childhood. Like many kids from that time, I had a Game Boy and played it most often while away from home. However, there was one game I owned for the Game Boy that kept me playing whether I was at home or on the go: The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. Link's Awakening was an important game for me growing up, taking the formula of A Link to the Past, one of my all-time favorite games, and condensing it to Game Boy form meant it was an automatic hit in my book. It also helped that a good friend of mine at that time was also playing the game, so we would often compare notes and help each other along throughout the game.
But wait! This isn't an article about Link's Awakening, so why am I spending so much time talking about it? Well, it has come to my attention recently that the topic of this article, a game by the name of For the Frog the Bell Tolls, and Link's Awakening have a lot in common. Specifically, both games share the same engine, so the aesthetic as well as certain gameplay mechanics are nearly identical between these two games. With Link's Awakening being a game that is so near and dear to me, I knew I had to check out For the Frog the Bell Tolls, so I bought an original Japanese Game Boy cartridge of the game and popped it into my Retron 5 complete with an English language translation patch so I could enjoy this adventure firsthand!
I love FMV (Full Motion Video) games, even though I understand that most of them are not really good games, as much as interesting relics of gaming's past. However, there are exceptions and Under a Killing Moon is one of them. You play Tex Murphy, a PI modeled after Spade and Marlowe that lives and works in a future vision of San Francisco. In this adventure, you take on a dangerous cult striving for genetic purification. For me, the Tex Murphy games are the pinnacle of FMV adventure with a combination of good writing, decent acting and a good dose of (intentional) humour.
