I’ve played Zoids: Legacy on the Game Boy Advance since its release, and I’ve got to tell you, it never gets old. Why? Well, I don’t really know. Maybe it’s because of Zoids: Legacy being a RPG-type title. There’s a helluva lot of outcomes for different situations the game throws at you in the course of playing it.
My only regret is playing the game over and over again and not buying its sequel, Zoids: Fuzors. Sigh. The Game Boy Advance and the Zoids: Legacy cartridge are long gone from my hands, but I can still relive the game through the …read more

I’ve been asking this question since the early 2000s, and I don’t know for the life of me why I didn’t bother looking the answer up with Google, or any other search engine for that matter. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to ruin the mystery. It turns out, however, that the disappearance of Strategic Simulations Inc. is not a mystery after all.
Like all things in the corporate world, Strategic Simulations Inc., or SSI, was acquired by a bigger video games development firm. Join me in a virtual tour of the history of SSI, which is, for me, one of …read more

While we are on the subject, I just want to express my appreciation for Japanese animé and how it has transformed fighting games from the usual two-dimensional side-scrollers to dynamic works of art.
I think the very pinnacle (at least for the moment) of this new age wonder is the Super Robot Wars, a series of tactical role-playing video games produced by the Japanese gaming company Banpresto, a division of Bandai, for various video game consoles and video game handheld consoles.
From the title alone, you should be able to guess what the game features: giant robots or mecha from multiple Japanese …read more

Okay, I’m stumped. Not that I mind, really. Not much anyway. It’s a little annoying knowing that you can’t beat a video game that you’ve played before. I’ll get over it, though.
Before I begin another mind-numbing round of Dungeon Keeper, which is, to me, one of the best games ever produced by Bullfrog Productions, I’m going back to the basics of the game in hope of retrieving as much useful information that will help me through my relearning phase. No, it’s not cheating. Let’s call it a reconnaissance.
Well, Dungeon Keeper’s interface is pretty much like that of real-time strategy games. …read more

By trying to keep up, I mean my futile attempts to keep up to the game as memories of playing it more than a decade ago flood my video game-addled head.
After a few hours (yeah, right) of playing Dungeon Keeper again, I still can’t make heads or tails of how the game works, despite having played it hundreds of times in the past … way baaack in the past.
So my knees finally buckle (or my eyes finally give way to Morpheus’ sand) and I sleep on it. While dreaming of Dungeon Keeper, I get this idea of doing a little …read more

Well, at least that’s how I see my role in this video game where you get to slap the butts of goblin slaves and other monsters to keep them in line and do your bidding.
Dungeon Keeper is a PC-based strategy game released by Bullfrog Productions in 1997. Gosh, has it really been a decade? Going back to the topic, the game puts you into the role of (what else!) a dungeon keeper instead of a knight in shining armor or a muscle-bound warrior in search of good booty. Yes, pretty cool, huh?
Your goal as Dungeon Keeper is to 1) build …read more

No other role-playing game has filled my sleeping and waking hours more than The Bard’s Tale, from Tales of the Unknown to Destiny Knight to Thief of Faith. Well, this isn’t entirely true, especially if you consider all the RPGs that have come out for the PC and the myriad consoles. But The Bard’s Tale rules the RPG domain on the Apple II.
My Apple IIc may be dead (may the computer gods bless its merry electronic soul), but the games I loved playing on it live on in this day and age—and The Bard’s Tale trilogy are among these.
Don’t know …read more