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Shinobi was recently given a new lease on life with releases on the Playstation 2 and Game Boy Advance. Hopefully, this signifies the resurgence of everyone’s favorite ninja and many more games in the future. Read our complete retrospective on the series, and watch out for the shurikens!
We’re seeing a resurgence of the OutRun franchise with the release of OutRun Online Arcade on Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network. With a history spanning almost twenty years, it’s very hard to have been a gamer for long and not have played even one entry in the series.
Very few RPG series stand the test of time. Sure, a few sequels might spring up here and there over the course of a few years, but how many of them last for over a decade? I can think of a couple, like Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Zelda, and perhaps a few others. These all have their charm and place in gaming history, to be sure. There is one franchise, however, that while not exactly a series per se, it has endured in one incarnation or another for almost fifteen years… the Shining series.
There were many factors that allowed Phantasy Star to be so innovative in every respect. Sega did manage to develop some very capable systems early in console development. That, coupled with great designers, led to very technologically advanced games. However, Sega’s business practices and general corporate attitude toward the game designer teams are what affected the game development most. In fact, Sega’s success (or lack thereof) with each game seems to parallel changes in the company’s business practices. The changing corporate attitude of Sega can be seen in the quality of the stories and the marketing used for each of the Phantasy Star installments.
Before going hentai, the Valis series of games offered solid platforming action with some great cut scenes and a rockin’ soundtrack. Released for all the consoles of the 16-bit era (the Genesis received three games), the origins of the franchise go back much further, and one would be surprised at just how everything started. This retrospective covers the entire history of the series, from its tangled origins to its final 2D gasps.