Stations of the cross (And square and circle and triangle..)

Stations of the cross (And square and circle and triangle..)

I've had a chipped Playstation (the manly rugged, rectangular Playstation not to be confused with its teletubby incarnation, the teeny tiny psone) sitting in a drawer unused for a few years now, but I came by some import games for it recently.
So, after dusting off the old grey box, looking puzzled and realising you need a SCART adaptor to run import games in colour, and then going out and tracking down one after everywhere had sold out (game - 21 quid!, they saw me coming )I got down to playing.

King's field -
I'd never heard of this until fairly recently ."The state" refers to it as "the most hostile RPG I've ever played" .This is true , everything ,and I mean everything , can and will kill you, snails, fish , dragonflies, a bizarre walking kraken squid like thing...all will in fact hunt you down and kill you. Its a first person RPG , so when the wildlife do massacre you its quite disturbing ,I've started being mildly afraid of snails after playing this. The music consists of about eight or nine notes played over and over in a minor key, and the human inhabitants of the island are blank faced freaks who turn slowly to look at you when you talk to them as if they were trapped souls forever tormented in hell...or something , its a creepy game.
But perversely I've actually started enjoying it , given its cruel nature and the fact that its profoundly broken in the learning curve stakes(look, even the save points are hidden , yes HIDDEN!! behind fake walls, that’s how hard it is) you get a real satisfaction out of even surviving 2 or three encounters. Whether I'm playing this in a month though , or whether its stupidly hard settings break me is another matter though...(for anyone interested , that state link above happens to have another link to a copy of the game, how illegal it is to download a 9 year old game for a system you cant buy new anymore is up to you..)

Blood Omen :legacy of Kain
or Zelda the Goth years
or how to be a complete bastard :Undead edition
I've mentioned this game before so I won’t go into detail again , it’s a Zelda style RPG lite , but with added vampires. As I've mentioned before you start off trying to be good, and resist your vamp nature, but since sucking blood tops up your health , you will be knee deep in drained wenches and dead innkeepers by teatime. A bad thing? Probably not. Graphics wise the game is a bit creaky, but the voice acting is great, and the story is both twisty and turny so it’s worth a gander. The PC version is over at the home of the underdogs site , but is missing the rendered cut scenes though...

VibRibbon

Bizarre this one, although I was expecting something stranger..you play by guiding a 2d wireframe cartoon rabbit like character over a 2d obstacle course filled with loops , pits and hills, by pressing various buttons. the view then gradually circles the 2d course in a sort of 3d effect.
The CLEVER bit though is that the "course" is really just a representation of the music playing in the background, a kind of psuedo-ossciloscope fashion , with the pits and loops being created by the beats etc, a bit like the years old cthuga software on the pc , only not)..even more CLEVER is that you can put on one of your own cd's for a new challenge(I recommend Daft Punk's: Discovery by the way) .It all looks nice, as its wireframe runs stupidly fast on the psx and Vib himself with his weird synth muppet voice is endearing enough(hit too many loops and pits and he devolves into as skipping frog thing , then into a weird TV/tadpole hybrid , its a bit like the DC game REZ only cuter.)
What would have been more CLEVER would have been that you had to move Vib along the "ribbon" with the analogue stick , up and down with the music , and press buttons to over come obstacles as well, but we'll save that for the sequel eh?

Right! thats my lot of now , I have more Playstation flavoured gaming goodness on its way to me in the form of Exhumed , Castlevania SOTN ,and Bishi bashi special so more from me as and when (or if past forms to be expected, probably sometime in Feburary)