After hearing about it for months, I finally started watching High Score Girl. And I finished it, too — it’s an easy series to binge, with only 12 episodes at 20+ minutes each. What a fun show!
At the risk of featuring too many PS4 games in recent posts (what can I say, they all have a retro connection or I wouldn’t be talking about them), Sega’s Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise (aka Hokuto no Gotoku) was released in the US this week, to the gleeful delight of combined Fist of the North Star and Yakuza fans everywhere. How wide or slim the overlap of that particular Venn diagram is, I don’t really know. But I’m wedged in there myself, and when this game was first announced, my head almost exploded like one of Kenshiro’s unfortunate opponents.
FotNSLP/HnG (it’s a long title either way, I don’t even know how to abbreviate it for this post) is just the latest in a really long line of video games based on the classic manga/anime property, Hokuto no Ken (lit. “Fist of the North Star”), dating all the way back to the ’80s when the manga was current and the show was actually airing on Japanese TV. Some of the games are good; many are not. And out of the dozens of HnK games released, only a handful were released outside of Japan. Let’s take a look at some of the good ones, shall we? (Perhaps I’ll do another post about all the not-so-good FotNS games someday, and call it “You’re Already Disappointed” or something.) (Don’t steal that, I just came up with it.) Continue reading “You’re Already Having Fun”
Did you know this was a thing? A lot of gamers don’t! But it’s true, Konami put out a 3-episode Salamander/Gradius OAV (original animation video, or direct-to-video anime) series in 1988.
Debuting in 1987, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future was a multi-media brand which included a TV series, a toy line, and various tie-in products. So why am I writing about it on my retro gaming blog? Because at its core, Captain Power was a game. Continue reading “Captain Power: A video game, but not a videogame”
Lupin the 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro is one of my all-time favorite movies. Like, not even just anime movies — it’s one of my favorite films, period, up there on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones level for me. I’ve owned it since the first official English-dubbed VHS of it was released in 1992, and have since bought it twice on DVD and once on Blu-ray. I’m even thinking about picking up an old Laserdisc of it just for completion’s sake.
If you don’t know the film, or the anime/manga character Lupin the 3rd — the short version is that Lupin started off as a manga in the late 1960s by an artist named Monkey Punch; had an anime TV series in the early ’70s; his first theatrical film and a second TV series in ’78; and in 1979, the second Lupin movie, The Castle of Cagliostro — the motion picture directing debut of a guy you may have heard of named Hayao Miyazaki — was released. Lupin went on to more movies, TV shows, TV specials, OAVs, and live action movies in subsequent years and remains a popular character to this day.
With that level of success, naturally, a number of Lupin videogames have been made over the years, and of those, three of them have been specifically based on Cagliostro, with one or two more taking liberal doses of inspiration from it. This is the specific subset of games I’ll be checking out in this post! Continue reading “Videogames from Cagliostro”
Retro Game SuperHyper 