Long before merging with Squaresoft, Enix released this launch window SNES title which bought together Castlevania-caliber action and Sim-City style level building. Playing as “The master” (or God, as he was known in the Japanese release) you awaken from a sleep of hundreds of years to take down “The Evil One” (or Satan, as he was called in Japan). First however, you have to restore your powers by restoring the people’s faith in you by helping re-develop their land in simulation-style segments and by destroying the Evil One’s minions via side scrolling action segments. By preforming certain tasks during the simulation levels, the Master will unlock new powers and magic. For those who didn’t care much for the simulation levels, a hidden professional mode was available which featured a high difficulty and maxed out attributes for the main character. A sequel was released a few years later which left out the simulation levels altogether, although it was still every bit as enjoyable as the first. Actraiser has already been re-released on the Japanese and European Virtual Console, so I have no doubt that it will be arriving here shortly.

A little trivia on this game: Although the game was heavy on Judeo-Christian themes, Nintendo of America policy strictly forbade content which could remotely be deemed offensive (i.e. gore and religious themes). This same policy caused the spells ‘holy’ and ‘death’ from the American SNES versions of Final Fantasy 4 and 6 to be renamed ‘pearl’ and ‘doom’.

ID is to first person shooters what Capcom and SNK are to fighting games. Not only have they practically invented the genre, their games have introduced several conventions that we take for granted today. Doom, Wolfenstein 3-d, and Quake were the top three shooter franchises for the company. While Quake didn’t have the impact on the genre that the other two games had, it still became a favorite among players, due to the fact that it’s open source code made it able to produce modifications and conversions for the game. Also, it was one of the first games to include multiplayer over the internet, and full 3-d movement. It was followed up by a sequel that eschewed the first game’s gothic textures for a more sci-fi plot, and again by a sequel that focused strictly on multiplayer combat. After reviving Doom 3 and Wolfenstein 3-d, ID dicided to bring back Quake as well, just in time for the next generation of console systems.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Because we didn’t have enough versions of the older Final Fantasy games they’re now being released in a similar but once again slightly improved version in “Final Fantasy Anniversary Edition” for the PlayStation portable. Gamespot has some images from the two games to be released, Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II. The graphics are 2D, not 3D like the recently released Final Fantasy III for the Nintendo DS, but they are still a considereable improvement over the last version of these games we’ve seen. The Wonderswan Color, PlayStation 1 and Gameboy Advance versions of Final Fantasy 1 and 2 all had essentially similar graphics which were redone since the original games. What we see here is an improvement of those graphics in a similar style.