The Island of Forgotten Games: Omega Boost

This column was originally published December 18, 2008 on Destructoid.com.



Omega Boost is one of the best action/shooter games on the Playstation, and nobody knows about it. Developed by Polyphony Digital (the Grand Turismo team), it's one of the only games to completely capture the Macross mech feel and style for a console game.

The plot is a silly mish-mash of ideas about the Omega Boost mech going back in time to stop the super computer ALPHA CORE from taking over the world of the future (Seriously, what is with video games and giant super-computers? Three of my columns have games that feature evil super computers in their plots.) It also features one awesomely cheesy intro, complete with amateurish live actors and music by the band Loudmouth.

But the game itself? WHEW! Fantastic. Not only does this game show what the Grand Turismo team can do on a game that doesn't involve cars, but a big chunk of the Panzer Dragoon team, as well as lead programmer Yuji Yasuhara, also worked on this, and it shows. The combat in this game is essentially Panzer Dragoon with mechs, with the mech designs of none other than Shoji Kawamori, designer of the Macross saga, giving the game a timeless futurist look, closer to classic shooters like Gradius and R-Type than the sleeker world of Zone of the Enders, not to mention this is one of the best looking games on the PSX, with visuals that miraculously still hold up today.

The gameplay is fast and fun. Your mech can turn in 360 degrees in all directions during battle, as well as use it's back boosters to quickly turn in the opposite direction while firing. The game also has a lock-on system and shoot system, which then sends out a barrage of laser guided missiles, Macross-style, into oncoming enemy waves. The gameplay is fast and furious, and the frame rate never dips below 30 fps, making the game run as smooth as silk.

The game is not without it's faults, however. For one, it's too short. As good as this game is, you're left with wanting more, with only 9 main levels and 9 bonus levels, the game could've used a few more missions and zones. Also, this game gets extremely difficuly by Zone 5, separating the boys from the men, so don't go in expecting a cake walk, you really have to know the controls inside and out for this game. Nonetheless, it remains a riveting and wholly exciting last hurrah for the original Playstation.

Why Didn't it Catch on?

One word: Marketing. For a game being published by Sony in-house, you'd think they would've thrown their weight behind this game when it comes to marketing, not so. Omega Boost was plagued by negative media in Japan reporting the game gave players motion sickness while playing (pansies), which killed sales in the land of the rising sun, and was released with little to no fanfare in the U.S. I came across this game only because of a demo display that a local Target store had up for it in the summer of '99, and bought it as soon as I could.

Very few people know about this game, which is a shame, because it is definitely one of the best mech action games available for any system. It's too bad Omega Boost tanked so badly, now the development team is stuck making racing games instead of unique projects like this. I implore everybody who owns a PSX, PS2 or compatible PS3 to track down this title, new copies are available on Amazon.com for less than ten bucks, it's well worth it.

The Island of Forgotten Games: Kabuki Quantum Fighter

This column was originally published November 3, 2008 on Destructoid.com.

The NES had its string of weird-ass and whacked-out ideas for video games, including such possible future columns as Monster Party, Samurai Zombie Nation, and A Boy and His Blob. But none will ever beat the over-arching weirdness of Kabuki Quantum Hair Fighter.

The game starts with a sequence complete with ridiculously slow text about a computer virus taking over the Earth's missile defense system in the year 2056, and our hero, Scott O'Connor, selflessly volunteers as a test subject for a program that will allow him to take on a new, digital form in a digitized world of the computer infra-structure to defeat the virus. His new form is, yes, Kabuki Quantum Fighter. Don't ask me how an Irish-American guy is transformed into a Japanese theater character, nor what Japanese Kabuki theater has to do with computers, it doesn't make any sense, and that's partly why it's awesome.

The digital world of Kabuki Quantum Fighter is ridiculous. So ridiculous, I wouldn't be surprised if this game gave younger kids nightmares back in the day. The enemies in this digital world look like they'd be more at home in a Castlevania game than in a world inside a computer. Toad Men with swords, robot dogs, giant heads that shoot lasers and fire, robot dogs with swords, it's absolutely whacked!

The backgrounds give a very distinct Batman NES vibe, really dark and black with color details here and there, like giant beating hearts! I know my computer has hearts in it, does yours?

And the best part of all? Your character! His basic attack? His hair! He swings his giant Kabuki wig at enemies that get in your way. For a real good laugh, try out a turbo controller and hold the B-button so he's constantly banging his head, it looks just like James Hetfield in his long hair days!

The game plays really closely to the Ninja Gaiden / Batman style of side-scroller: Lots of running and jumping around and hitting enemies as they get close to you, with a boss at the end of every level.

Why Didn't it Catch on?:

Now the game IS fun, don't get me wrong, but let's be honest here: Was there really a demand for games about Kabuki actors inside Hellish computers in 1990? Add to that the fact that the box-art is less than enticing to the average consumer seeing this on the shelves, and you have a title that could've declared itself DOA, which is too bad, as the final screen of the game features the main character bowing and asking to check him out in his next game, which never appeared.

Despite (or because) of it's bizarre exterior, Kabuki Quantum Fighter is all-in-all, a fun little platform / action game. If you're a fan of the Ninja Gaiden series or its equivalents, definitely try this out, it'll be worth your time, if only just so you can tell your friends you played Kabuki Quantum Fighter.

Note: This game was originally published by the now-defunct HAL America. HAL America is long gone, but I bet you can guess what happened to the development side of the company in Japan, can't you?

The Island of Forgotten Games: Alundra

This column was originally published October 3, 2008 on Destructoid.com.
Alundra, Alundra, a game after my own heart. As a dyed in the wool lover of classic Super NES adventure games like Illusion of Gaia, Secret of Mana, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (No duh) Alundra left a big impression on me when I first saw the ads for it in the Summer of 1997. Here was the pinnacle of the technologies that gave us those classic top-down adventure games, now popping up on the Playstation. And from the developers of Landstalker, to boot!

The game follows the adventures of a young boy named Alundra, who is plagued by horrendous nightmares. These nightmares prophecy that young Alundra will be the chosen one destined to save the world from darkness. After a storm leaves him ship-wrecked in the small town of Inoa, Alundra's adventure begins when he must take up the battle against a group of forest monkeys to save the villagers that have adopted him as one of their own.

Simple, yes, but there's more in the telling than the tale. Much like the Dark World in Link to the Past, Alundra can sometimes enter the Nightmare World, the world within our dreams, to save friends while on his journey. These parallel dimension areas are excellently inter-woven into the narrative of the gameplay, giving the game a larger scope, and putting secondary characters in harm's way, sometimes leading to their deaths, a rarity in this genre.

The dungeons in this game are not only fantastic, but also extremely difficult. Much like the best puzzles in the Zelda series, each dungeon has a number of brain-teasers that'll make you scratch your head and really push yourself to think outside the box to move on. This is still sometimes considered one of the hardest games on the original Playstation.

Graphically, the game has very nicely detailed 2-D backgrounds and character sprites, looking like a richly textured SNES game. The whole game has a very earthy feel, with lots of natural tones and environments with lots of texture. Character animation can sometimes look more limited than the technology at the time could do, but it doesn't really matter in the scheme of things. It looks and plays enough like an SNES RPG that more fluid animation could've pulled the player out of the experience the game is trying to build.

The music, the MUSIC! The music in this game is phenomenal. Composer Kohei Tanaka's score quickly can go from a very melody-based sound for villages and fields, to a very atmospheric effect for dungeons and the nightmare world. The soundtrack actually reminded me a lot of Mitsuda's score for Chrono Trigger, it's that good.

So if this game is as amazing as it seems (completely honest here, it really is) why have so many people not heard of it? This really should be up there with the classic action RPG / adventure offerings on the SNES, as well as other Working Designs published titles like Lunar. So why isn't it?

Why Didn't it Catch on?:

Alundra was released at a peculiar time for the video game industry. More and more games on the next-generation systems at the time were being developed with 3D graphics, and two-dimensional games were seen as a dying breed of the past. Consider the fact that Sony actually published Alundra in Japan, but Sony Computer Entertainment of America refused to localize and publish it here, and you can see where the industry was going. Working Designs ultimately published it in the U.S. (with Psygnosis handling the game in Europe) and gave it a strong (for Working Designs) advertising campaign in the U.S. buying ad space in EGM, Game Informer and Gamepro for full-page ads.

The game was released in the winter of 1997 to fairly positive reviews. IGN gave it an 8.5 out of ten, Gamespot gave it an 8.8, and EGM gave it an 8.6.

As per the norm of Working Designs, only an initial print-run was made to keep demand up and to avoid discounted bargain copies at major retailers. It's somewhat rare, but isn't expensive like many classics of the Playstation era like Final Fantasy VII and Working Designs own Lunar:Silver Star Story and Eternal Blue.

Today, when I ask people about the game, I rarely will hear anybody has heard of it, let alone played it, I'm met with blank stares. In the last month of asking a ton of people if they've played Alundra, only one person has said they've played it, to which they enthusiastically followed up with "I can't believe somebody else has played it!"

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that 2D games were a dying breed by late 1997, and gamers had already had their taste of Final Fantasy VII. Anything else would be a step-down to them, which is a shame, because if Alundra had been released for the SNES in 1995 or '96, it may have been considered a classic of the adventure genre. As it stands, it was a mild curiosity item to many in '97: an out of date dinosaur in a modern three-dimensional world. Don't write it off as many did, it just may be one of the best games nobody's played on the Playstation.

Note: There was a sequel released in February of 2000 in North America. This is a sequel in name only, as it's story has absolutely nothing to do with the original game. And it's in 3D.

The Island of Forgotten Games: Metal Storm

This column was originally published August 21, 2008 on Destructoid.com.



There are those games that defined a generation. Mention Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid and any gamer worth his salt will know what you're talking about. There are also the titles that are so horrendous, so three week old carton of milk bad, that any gamer will cringe at the mere mention of a title like Shaq-Fu, Bebe's Kids, or Deadly Towers.

But what about the games that are neither? What about the titles that may have been good games, even great ones, but due to unseen circumstances never caught on like they should have, resulting in full bargain bins around the country? This is the column for them: The Island of Forgotten Games.

Metal Storm. Quite possibly one of the best games Irem has ever made. What if you took the action gameplay of Contra, mixed with the shooter hell of Irem's R-Type series, then threw some anti-gravity boots into the blender? Metal Storm would be what came out. I think I'll leave it up to the back of the box description to summarize this particular gem:

"Battle Station Cyberg's massive computer that keeps throughout the solar system is no longer user friendly. It's gone wildly out of control. The LaserGun it operates has already destroyed Neptune. Earth is its next target.

As a high-tech hot shot, you must enter Cyberg's core and activate the system's self-destruct mechanism. Mankind is relying on your know-how and toughness to see this thing through. But time is running out...

Oh yes, one more thing. The powers of your "Gravity Flip" Suit are essential for a successful outcome to this mission. The Suit empowers you to proceed both upside down and rightside up as you dash to put this computer permanently "On the blink."'

And yes, that pretty much describes the awesomeness that is in store for the player.

As the description entails, the big part of this game that makes it fresh and stand out from the crowd of NES action games is the gravity mechanic. Considering this is the NES we're talking about, this must have been a programming miracle. The gravity-flipping mechanic is so unique, it's still impressive almost 20 years later.

Plus, this game is hard, I mean REALLY hard. Considering this was made by the same team that made the original R-Type, that should be no surprise, but then factor in that with the gravity mechanic, this game just became doubly hard, forcing you to make split second decisions about your movement either upside or rightside up. If you make the wrong choice, you're toast. The first one or two levels are balanced enough to get the hang of the gravity switching, but it gets hard fast. Only the committed should bother with Metal Storm.

Graphically and sonically, the game is actually really nice still, opting for a complex Japanese mech look for the game. Most of the mech designs actually reminded me a lot of anime like Macross and Robotech. And the bosses in this game are huge walking, rotating jumbles of pipes and gyros, and most of these bosses also force you to use your gravity powers to the best of your advantage.Special mention must be made of the explosion effects in the game, which are very nicely animated and still stand out today.

Why didn't it catch on?:

I have my own theories, the biggest of which being that Super Mario Bros. 3 came out only a few months earlier than Metal Storm, basically stealing any and all hype on the NES for the next few months. Metal Storm probably just got lost in the post-SMB 3 hype like many of the underrated classics of the NES (which will be discussed in future columns.)

Second of all, the gravity mechanic, while very cool, is hard to communicate through descriptions and screen-shots of the game, it's one of those ideas which needs to be seen to be understood. By not seeing the major selling-point of the game, most consumers wrote it off as another standard action game that the NES was pumping out its entire lifetime.

Metal Storm was a game that was definitely ahead of it's time to the point that many of it's time didn't get it, and unfortunately is not seen as one of the all-time classics of the NES era because of it. Used copies of the game regularly go for five to ten dollars on used game sites, so do yourself a favor and pick up a copy so Metal Storm will be unknown no longer!

-Zach McCue